How successful people work with frustrating colleagues: strategist
Practical realists and head-in-the-cloud dreamers don’t always get along in the workplace.
The problem: You need both for your business to succeed, according to Beth Viner, a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group’s tech, design and business unit.
Dreamers, who tend to think on a grand scale about big-picture goals, can “often seem untethered to reality” to others, Viner said in a recent TED Talk, given in November 2023. At times, that puts them at odds with their realist counterparts, the “doers” who build and sustain companies.
“Finding a way to bridge this tension — that’s the key to organizations being able to both keep on keeping on, while building and capturing new growth,” said Viner, whose resume includes an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, an executive role at Kickstarter and a CEO position at consulting firm Interbrand New York & San Francisco.
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At one job, you could be a dreamer, and in another, a doer. The roles aren’t static: Viner said she’s assumed both identities at different points in her career.
In her talk, Viner largely addressed the dreamers in the room — but the lessons she shared are applicable to everyone. Here are her top three tips for working with those colleagues you may find the most frustrating.
Bring everyone to the table
Dreamers are prone to moving quickly, without much concern for how their company usually does things, Viner said. That risks passing over the ideas of the doers who work within those existing frameworks.
In particular, doers can view a dreamers’ workflow as “foggy,” and dreamers can see doers as “too rigid or prescriptive,” said Viner, noting: “How each group does the work probably makes the other quite uncomfortable.”
To remedy this, she recommended establishing what she calls “a corporate mosh pit.” In mosh pit sessions, teams sit down together specifically so doers can deliver feedback on upcoming projects to dreamers.
Getting both groups of people into the same room — with a shared purpose — can improve decision-making across an entire company, Viner said.
“It requires acknowledging those who are explicitly not like you,” she said. “Invite them into your work, raid their brains and hook their hearts to what you’re doing.”
Slow things down — a little
Another possible solution, Viner suggested: Set up regular “speed bump” meetings that run throughout the duration of a project. Similar to the mosh pit sessions, the point of a speed bump meeting is to get everybody on the same page and keep parts of the team from racing too far ahead.
“I believe that that creates better alignment among the humans around you,” Viner said. Don’t schedule speed bumps too frequently, or nobody will reach their objectives in a timely fashion, she added.
Then, whenever a project goes well, celebrate the win. Make sure you honor everyone’s contributions, so no one feels left out.
“It doesn’t take your boss to make a party. You are there,” Viner said. “Stand up, celebrate, acknowledge the humans around you.”
Use ‘cold, hard cash’
Not everyone has access to the company’s purse strings — but if you do, you can use money as a powerful incentive to encourage people to work in tandem.
You need to get their “buy-in,” Viner said. “Not with gestures or words, but with cold, hard cash.”
This advice is particularly relevant to CEOs and hiring managers, who have the authority to shape staffing or offer raises strategically. Try tying part of a team’s compensation to the full performance of the business, for example. That motivates everybody to work together across the company in a mutually supportive way, Viner said.
Encouraging that kind of collaboration ensures “all the other things — building relationships, cross-business line sharing, internal communications — happen, just at a much more rapid rate,” she said.
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