Our team is not made up of a bunch of friends and yours shouldn’t be either

“I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that’s what’s important to me.” — Linus Torvalds

Would you discard one of the most brilliant minds in computer science because he lacks social abilities?

As a manager I’m sure that healthy relationships are critical for the success of our team. It’s just that I don’t think a welcome free lunch, a beer or a video game party should be the main strategy to build them.

Great teams aren’t made of individuals sharing the same hobbies or sense of humor, great teams are made of individuals trusting and respecting each other’s work. Being able to truly appreciate the bizarre sense of humor from some eccentric colleague is a plus, not a requirement.

Breaking down what’s a good work relationship

The basics for a good work relationship are trust, respect and self-awareness .

If such work environment exists people will feel comfortable to handle conflict instead of avoiding it in favor of superficial harmony.

How to create real connections

We choose our friends and learn to love our family but our coworkers happen to be people that someone else placed with us to… work on the same tasks as we do. These people happen to be the ones we spend the majority of our time with and we can’t escape from it.

This is an advantage that managers should use to create the best possible work environment. We should give just enough direction and set the right ecosystem to have people engage with each other naturally. In short, promote interactions, don’t impose them.

How? You may ask.

What do we have in common in the first place? We work for the same company, share the same duties and know the insights of the same project. Start by making sure that everyone knows each other’s role and expectations.

Be clear about what you expect from the team. For instance, and for simplicity sake, I’ll list 2 ways of managing work inside a team: having team members making decisions with the occasional misjudgment error (the “better ask for forgiveness than permission” approach) or having every action validated beforehand. Both are acceptable but make sure that everyone in team is following the same practice.

Promote collaboration, delegate responsibilities and make everyone comfortable enough to have contrary opinions.

Don’t get me wrong, you should organize lunches (you know, once we achieve herd immunity), paintball games and karaoke sessions but I suggest you to invest far more energy in creating a clear communication about what the team goals are and what role each individual will have to achieve them.

I do take time to understand the personal values and interests from everyone in the team. If someone does not want share them or, for some reason, we do not feel a friendly connection then we’ll still rely in our common goals and professional respect to have a healthy work relationship.

Takeaways

It’s great to have people knowing about each other and it’s better to have people loving to spend time outside working hours with their workmates, but I believe that closer personal relations should come naturally, after professional trust is established.

If you try to build relations in your team based on superficial connections, you’re taking chances that some bad joke may compromise them.