We don't always get to choose our teammates, especially at work. So what practise you do when you just don't get along with someone on your team?

What's your point?

Not too long agone, I was doing our Beautiful Teams talk at a dark-brown bag luncheon for a big financial company here in New York. At the terminate of the talk, I got a really skilful question:

What exercise you do when you're on a team with people who don't get forth?

Nosotros don't get to cull our teams, and while I've been on plenty of teams that gelled actually well, I've definitely had to work with people who just rubbed me the wrong fashion or, worse, where the feeling was mutual. Information technology's a tough problem, but one that should be really familiar to anyone who'due south been working with teams for a long fourth dimension.

I have to admit that while I've had success working on teams with people who didn't get along, at that place take definitely been a few times when I didn't handle that state of affairs every bit well as I could take. Luckily, those are the situations where we learn the near.

That's actually 1 of the chief reasons Jenny and I wanted to talk to Andy Lester when we were talking to contributors for Beautiful Teams. Andy runs a cracking website called The Working Geek, where he talks about working life for programmers, sysadmins and other geek types. And he had some actually interesting things to say nigh how people collaborate with each other â€" peculiarly geeky types (like me), since we seem to exist peculiarly prone to interpersonal problems. (Imagine that!)

I actually liked this quote from Andy, considering I think it cuts to the centre of the matter:

I was on a team in one case where I said, "At the very least, can we simply have minimal respect for everyone here?" And I was asked quite seriously by someone else, "Well, what if not everybody on this team is worthy of respect?" And that'southward baffling to me as a homo, only it's also non uncommon. And that minimal corporeality of respect is something that many just don't get.

â€" Andy Lester, Cute Teams (affiliate 5)

He's right. When I look back over my own career, I find that many of my own conflicts with people on my team stemmed from a basic lack of respect. Since I was the top programmer on the team, I thought I knew better than everyone else about everything. Once someone got something wrong technically, I'd write that person off entirely because they didn't have my respect.

Andy offers some really adept personal advice for getting past those problems, both in his Beautiful Teams chapter and on his blog.

But I wanted to become a little further than that, considering sometimes interpersonal issues aren't going to be repaired. The person who asked me the question was in this state of affairs: when I asked him about information technology, information technology sounded like some of his teammates were only never going to get along with each other. So what do you lot do nigh that?

As it turns out, the answer I gave him comes from another part of Beautiful Teams. When Jenny and I were putting it together, we put a lot of thought into how to split up it into sections. And so many people talked explicitly almost setting goals for projects that we ended up including an unabridged section called Goals.

So my answer to anyone who's got insurmountable (at least, in the short run) conflicts between squad members is to make sure that yous've established what many of our contributors referred to as an "elevating goal."

One of those contributors was Steve McConnell, who as well happens to be one of my favorite authors. We asked some other one of our favorite authors (and an onetime friend of mine), Scott Berkun, to interview him for the book, and out of that interview came this great quote:

If you’re out digging ditches, that’s non very elevating or inspiring. But if you’re digging ditches to protect your town that’s near to be attacked by an enemy, well, that’s more inspiring, even though it’s the same action. Then the leader’due south chore, really, is to endeavour to determine or frame the activity in such a way that people can sympathise what the value is.

â€" Steve McConnell, Beautiful Teams (chapter 16)

I retrieve that really cuts to the heart of what information technology means to establish an elevating vision, and it should assistance testify why that can help get past serious squad problems. I take to admit that before working on this book, I hadn't really given that much idea to establishing a vision. Yes, establishing a goal for a project is important, but I e'er idea about it in terms of the work that had to be done. I'd generally dismiss anything like an "elevating vision or goal" every bit a business-speak buzzword. A really valuable lesson for me was but how important it is to get everyone on the squad on lath with that ane atypical vision â€" and I mean really agreement and embracing the vision for the project, and non just like-minded to some sort of lame mission statement.

What's especially useful virtually getting everyone on the squad to see the same vision is that yous don't need to be a manager or team lead to do it. All you need to practice, minimally, is talk to people on your team. I've been brought onto projects where people on the team thought that in that location were serious compages or requirements or quality issues. Simply one time I started I talking to people, information technology turned out that everyone had a completely dissimilar idea of what they were edifice and why they were building information technology. I've found over and over once again that just writing down what we're building and who we're building information technology for (using a Vision and Scope Document, for example) is enough to aid the situation. Information technology's uncanny how often I've heard people say something like, "Wait, we're building what? I thought we were doing something completely unlike!"

Anyone on the team can do that, and information technology's a really valuable tool to help with serious teammate bug. The clearer everyone sees the real goal of the projection, the easier information technology is to get past the disagreements and arguments and become on with the work. It's something I've seen in real life many times, and it really does work: people are much more willing to settle disagreements and simply get down to business concern if they can see that there'south a existent end that they're working towards.

When I look back at the times where I was able to successfully navigate serious team problems that were caused by people who didn't like each other, I can see how this is exactly what I did. Fifty-fifty when people didn't get along, I constitute that if I was able to get each person to run across the bigger picture and piece of work towards something he or she believed in, then most of the fourth dimension they were able to put their bug on the dorsum burner, at to the lowest degree long plenty to get through, say, a meeting or a code review. And that was enough to save the projection.