At some point in your work life you’re going to run into a situation where you will have to work with someone you don’t like. And if that person is a member of your team — because they have the unique skills required to do the job — it may be a big challenge for you.

Working with someone you don’t like can raise your stress level and impact your productivity, so you’ll want to make sure you find a way to deal with the issue. The key to this is to remember that the one thing you can control in the situation is your response.  As the saying goes,

Life is 10% what happens and 90% how we respond to it.

So, how do you cope? Do you have to set your values aside to make your work life tolerable? Nope. Your first step is to take a logical view of the situation. Determine what it is about the person that irks you so much. If it’s a behavior they can change, you might want to consider whether giving them feedback will improve the situation.

If you determine feedback won’t improve the situation, you’ll need to develop a relationship that enables the two of you to work together to achieve the goals of your team. This can start with a simple, frank discussion. Something like, “I know we have our differences, and that’s okay. We both bring value to this project and I’d like to make sure we have a good working relationship to ensure the project outcome is the best it can be. Here’s what I’d like to do to make that happen…”

It will take a bit more work on the part of both of you to make this relationship successful, but will be worth it in the long run.

What do you think? Have you been in a situation like this? Please offer your suggestions by leaving a comment.

When entering a new position that has an established team, how would you best approach the team to gather info about each member, find out their strong and weak points, find out “what they do” and what makes them tick? I know this could come off as a “bad thing” day one, so I am trying to see how best to go about this to get good feedback and input without coming off as negative?

The Team Doc Says…

This is a really good thing to do when you first join a team. It’s a good way to get acclimated to the style of each team member and to learn about what the team is doing. If your team leader hasn’t set this up for you (they should!), you need to suggest it in the spirit of “onboarding” to the team.

A good way to accomplish this is to jot down a few questions ahead of time that will help you achieve what you are trying to find out. Plan on spending about an hour with each team member. Create your question template, put together an interview plan and then discuss it with your team leader.

Once approved by your team leader, coordinate with your teammates to develop a workable schedule of interviews. You may find during the discussion that you want to spend more time with one member or another. If that’s the case, set that up before the time with them ends.

By the time you are done with your interviews, you should have a good handle on what’s going on with the team, what team members are working on and a bit about their style of working. The biggest value you will get out of this is the relationships you will be starting to build with others on your team. That’s something that will help you for a long time to come.

What about you reader? Do you have other suggestions? Please leave a comment.

We have recently been having some problems with things not getting done properly. We don’t know exactly which person to “correct” as everyone does everything. They all schedule appointments some, feed the animals some, etc. So, when we find a pet left without water or an appointment scheduled incorrectly, we don’t know who made the mistake. We’ve tried just speaking of the error to the group with “I don’t know who did this and it really doesn’t matter, but we do want everyone to try to do better…”. But, some become defensive and start pointing fingers….

The Team Doc Says…

You are finding out the hard way that when everyone’s in charge, no one is in charge. And no one can be held accountable under that type of system.

You need to define roles for any given day in your clinic. Assign people to the role for that day and then hold them accountable for those tasks. You may have tasks you need to assign backup for because of the nature of the task, but use caution in assigning more than one person.

You may also need to set up a quality control / quality assurance process for some tasks. This can be as simple as having a check in sheet in specific areas of the clinic. For example, if water needs to be checked in cages on a regular basis, you could create a sheet showing the times it needs to be checked and affix it to the cage. Each time your team member checks it, she can sign it to indicate she did indeed check the water. If it gets missed, guess who’s held accountable? Exactly! And no excuses are allowed.

This is going to take you a bit of time to organize, but it will be worth it in the long run. And it will help your team too. When people are assigned a role, they can take pride in completing it. It helps them shine. And they don’t have to worry about someone pointing a finger at them because it’s assumed they did something wrong.

What about you reader? Have more advice to give? Please leave a comment.

I am the a program manager of a 14 bed girls facility and I am having a hard time having the staff become a team. Working as a team is important so that the girls do not split staff and triangulate… Any suggestions?

The Team Doc Says…

You must have a good foundation for your team to ensure they work well together. My favorite way to look at the basics that are needed for a team, is to use the definition coined by Katzenbach and Smith in their book The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. They say:

“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

Every component in this definition must be in place within your team to function at its most productive. You can read the full definition of a team here.

The key points for helping your team work better together to provide a united front is to have a team based on trust and open communication. There is nothing that can separate a team with these components in place.