How to “Play Well” With Your Co-Workers

Do you realize that your behavior at work can advance or ruin your career? Notice that performance, promptness, or goal achievement are not mentioned. Along with completing your duties on time and with high quality, your workplace behavior will help or hurt your career. You must learn to “play well” with your co-workers, regardless of your—or their—position on the organization chart.

The Importance of Relationships

Just as successful relationships are critical to a good quality of personal life, your workplace relationships are a key to your professional life. Consistently proven, good relationships lead to personal success, high performance, and job satisfaction.

Multiple independent surveys indicate that strong work relationships are a primary basis for promotions, compensation increases, and achieving workplace and company goals. An equally important—if not more so—fact is management perception of your behavior and relationships.

Employees who have obvious good relationships with peers lead management to perceive high performance, even if some of your results are rather pedestrian. Once again, this perception usually becomes reality—including more promotion opportunities and better compensation.

If you doubt the validity of this situation, do some research on your own. Companies are aware of this workplace necessity and often turn to well-respected objective organizations to measure and confirm this reality. For example, the well-known Gallup organization uncovered a most interesting result from a recent survey. While conducting a work satisfaction study, Gallup learned that having a “best friend” at work is critically important to employee performance and job satisfaction.

As you can see, your workplace relationships, whether good or bad, affect your career with your current employer. Current superior relationships—or extremely poor relations—can also affect your future jobs, for better or worse. Reference checks can sometimes generate employer comments either supporting or detracting from your candidacy for a new position.

How to “Play Well” With Others at Work

First, you should understand that all work and jobs interconnect with other employees and their duties. This is the underlying reason—and influence—that make good relationships so important. Here are some proven suggestions to help you “play better” with your co-workers, be they peers or management.

• Find and suggest solutions to ongoing problems. Workplace problems can come in wide varieties, from personality conflicts, production issues, low quality performance, unsafe working conditions, and all manner of other operations, financial, and personnel issues. Finding solutions to workplace problems enhances your image with peers and management alike. This is a huge “play well” winning strategy.
• Never play the “blame game.” All too common in business, the blame game is an easy—yet dangerous—game to play. To paraphrase a common business and government cliché, “Failure is always attributed to one person; success always seems to have many willing to take the credit.” Those who enjoy playing the blame game tend to have few friends at their workplace. This occurs because even those not targets of blame usually feel empathy or sympathy for the person accused. Therefore, when you play the blame game, you often find yourself on a workplace “island” with no friends at all.
• Carefully watch both your verbal and non-verbal communications. Many people learn to watch what they say at work, but neglect to monitor their non-verbal communications. They fail to control their body language, voice tone, facial expressions, cynical delivery of information, and other equally important non-verbal actions. For example, you could harm relationships even while verbalizing a complement if your body language or tone indicates a deeper, truer negative feeling. Your co-workers will sense—and remember—the negative vibrations long after forgetting the good words you said.
• Avoid setting up or blind siding your fellow workers and management. This activity can be even more dangerous than the blame game. When you have a problem or there is a disturbing issue at work, don’t announce it at a department meeting or complain to others—or worse, management—before discussing the issue with the person causing or involved in it. Blind siding an unsuspecting co-worker in a public forum or bringing the problem to a higher ranking person only destroys good work relationships.
• Meet all of your deadlines and keep all of your commitments. Remember, all work is interconnected. Therefore, when you miss deadlines or fail to keep commitments and promises, you affect all other co-workers. While everyone understands that on rare occasions you could be a little late for a tight deadline, repetitive failures will generate bad will and poor workplace relationships.

Learning to “play well” with your co-workers makes your job more pleasant, the workplace more enjoyable, and launches your career to greater success. It’s not difficult. Just monitor and control your behavior, trying to avoid the damaging actions noted and concentrating on becoming a workplace resource for others.