D

Camaraderie over Competence

The importance of liking people is the subject of an article in the Harvard Business Review, which has carried out an experiment to find out who we’d rather work with. Hardly surprisingly, the people we want most as our workmates are both: brilliant at their jobs and delightful human beings. And the people we want least are both unpleasant and useless. More interestingly, the authors found that, given the choice between working with lovable fools and competent jerks (性情古怪的人), we irresistibly choose the former. Anyway, who likes those stupid men who annoy or hurt other people? We might insist that competence matters more, but our behavior shows we stay close to the people we like and sharing information with them.

What companies should therefore do is get people to like each other more. The trick here is apparently to make sure staffs come across each other as often as possible during the day. They also should be sent on bonding courses and so on to encourage friendliness and break down displeasure. However, more outdoor-activity weekends and shared coffee machines inspire no confidence at all.

The reality is that people either like each other or they don’t. You can’t force it. Possibly you can make offices friendlier by tolerating a lot of chat, but there is a productivity cost to that. In my experience, the question of lovable fool against competent jerk may not be the right one. The two are interrelated: we tend not to like our workmates when they are completely hopeless. I was once quite friendly with a woman whom I later worked with. I found her to be so outstandingly bad at her job that I lost respect for her and ended up not really liking her at all. Then is there anything that companies should be doing about it?

By far the most effective strategy would be to hire people who are all pretty much the same, given that similarity is one of the main determinants of whether we like each other. I think this is a pretty good idea, but no one dares recommend this anymore without offending the diversity lobby group. There is only one acceptable view on this subject: teams of similar people are bad because they stop creativity. This may be true, though I have never seen any conclusive proof of it.

Not only do we like similar people, we like people who like us. So if companies want to promote more liking, they should encourage a culture where we are all nice to each other. The trouble is that this needs to be done with some skill.