If you can’t make everyone like you, at least make sure you’re not needlessly making enemies. Here’s how to cut the emotional cost and set smart boundaries at work.
I’d much rather be a bit bland – neutral like Switzerland, or one of those pH-balanced face cleansers. But instead of “pH 7” I’ve somehow earned a PhD in being blunt and polarizing. Apparently, I’m one of those people you either love or hate. So, by necessity, I became my own guinea pig – spending the past decade in management trying every trick in the book to deal with it. From my default setting of pragmatic, robot-grade charm, all the way to fanatical How to Win Friends and Influence People–style Carnegie experiments on real coworkers in real offices. ❶ The healthiest boundary I ever came across? It came from my boss, Jarek – while he was scolding me.
Why do companies pour so much into “team-building”? What are the two most common sources of conflict? And what should you not do if you don’t want to end up blaming yourself? Find out in this week’s Memo.
The Silver Fox
“Silver foxes” is a tongue-in-cheek term for managers who’ve already gone gray from years of corporate fun and games. The kind who’ve spent decades perfecting the skill of not getting turned into a fox-fur coat — and Jarek was one of them. Sharp, energetic, and terrifyingly pragmatic, he made it nearly impossible to guess his age.
Back in the 1990s, while Poland’s economy was still learning to crawl — headfirst down the ladder, wailing — Jarek was busy shaping his work ethic and honing his craft as a sales director on multimillion-dollar deals with American clients.
Now a content resident of the Polish version of the Hamptons – Sopot – he kept himself busy more as a hobby, running sales at a company just 500 meters from his house. It also happened to be where I worked. Reporting to Jarek turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Bull in a China Shop
It was 2018, just before GDPR came into effect. That morning, Jarek stormed onto the open space without his usual “Hi everyone!” Instead, he marched straight across the floor and, without even looking at me, waved me into his corner office – affectionately nicknamed “the aquarium.”
Once inside, he sat down, took off his glasses, and laid them on the desk, rubbing his eyes – out of fatigue or disbelief. I was about to find out.
“Please,” he began, “tell me this isn’t true.”
My half-asleep brain scrambled through a mental list of things our teams had recently pulled off – the kind Jarek would definitely prefer not to be true. I was somewhere around item six when he sighed and added:
“Tell me it’s not true that we took the account manager’s contact info from our job board and spun up a brand new internal recruitment department for your teams – right here on our floor.”
Right. HR was just too slow for me. I was done playing broken telephone with candidates through them as middleman. I was writing the job ads myself anyway. Taking over the whole process and cutting down the back-and-forth just felt like the natural move.
To be honest, it didn’t even make the list I was still mentally assembling in that moment. I had all the corporate finesse of a bull in a china shop, so it never occurred to me that someone in HR might not love my brilliant plan to cut them out of ~half of their job.
The Rest Are to Be Friends
“HR will file an internal report that we violated candidate data protection procedures,” Jarek informed me.
“These procedures aren’t even in effect yet,” I pointed out.
“Yes. That’s true. You’re right. They aren’t.”
I was just about to turn on my heel and leave when he added:
“That’s exactly why tomorrow you’ll go to HR with flowers, apologize sincerely, tell them this was your biggest mistake, that you love working with them, and that it will never, ever happen again.”
I was dumbfounded. Why on earth should I apologize for streamlining a process — and doing part of their job for them?!
“Michał,” Jarek said slowly, in the tone of someone explaining a basic fact of life to a not-very-gifted Labrador
- “some people won’t like us because it’s in their interest,
- some people won’t like us just because,
- and that’s why the whole point is: the rest are to be friends.”
Two Sides of Conway’s Law
Even though they don’t have to stay that way, workplace relationships — at least at the beginning — are synthetic, functional in nature. Conway’s Law ❷, which I also reference in the piece “Respect the Status Quo” (coming soon), works both ways: not only (1) do organizations design systems that mirror their own structure, but also (2) the structure of an organization — meaning the relationships inside it — must fit the tasks it carries out.
That’s why, no — it’s not really up to you, as a hiring manager, whether you like Betty from HR or want to work with her. Getting along with Betty from HR — required by the company’s structure — is part of your job, part of the task. If the quality of that communication is average, your results and their evaluation will be average too. Companies, aware of this, try to support relationships by organizing team-building opportunities. But in the end, as much as possible, maintaining healthy relationships with coworkers — especially along functional lines — is your obligation, completely independent of your personal taste in people.
How Nice Is Too Nice?
Jarek’s advice, luckily, came with two safety valves — two reality checks:
- It normalizes the fact that some people simply won’t like us because their interests conflict with ours. People are pragmatic, and it’s hard to defend those kinds of relationships on social grounds. ❸
- It allows for purely personal clashes. Unless you’re a card-carrying member of the mutual admiration society, your team was built for function, not personal chemistry — so friction will happen.
What I value is that Jarek suggested writing these off as a cost of doing business, instead of chasing the impossible goal of winning over absolutely everyone. That helped me avoid unnecessary emotional toll — in that job, and in the ones that followed.
I also read in his advice a kind of permission: not to expect myself to genuinely like people who sabotage my efforts, or whose style and attitude I find unbearable. Jarek’s point wasn’t about being fake or cynical. It was about pragmatic professionalism — and avoiding conflict everywhere it’s not natural or necessary.
So how do you treat relationships at work? Do you take every one to heart, or do you let the occasional bad fit roll off you? Do you agree with Jarek’s advice, or do you approach it differently?
Drop me a note — I’d love to hear how you draw your own boundaries.
Sources & side notes
① Carnegie, D. (1936). How to Win Friends and Influence People. New York: Simon & Schuster
② Conway, M. (1968). How Do Committees Invent? Datamation, Vol. 14, No. 4. melconway.com
③ Interestingly, years later François Nuyts, then CEO of Allegro, shared a similar observation with me: that we often, almost unintentionally, tend to like coworkers who consistently “deliver” and can be relied on — and that this reliability also strengthens the social dimension of the relationship.