Lessons From The Who: How To Work With Folks You Don’t Like

RELATED STORIES

Five Ways To Win Over Your New Boss

What To Do When Your Boss Asks You To Bend The Rules

Don’t Be Red-Faced When Your Friend Gets Pink Slipped

Who doesn’t get along with their co-workers? The Who! That's who.

The band is reuniting for an upcoming tour, kicking off in Detroit on Oct. 21, that stands to bring in $100 million. One snag in the plan? Guitarist Pete Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey have never hidden their dislike for each other.

As recently as July 18, the New York Post [NWS] reported that the pair are not even on speaking terms and they’ve requested separate travel arrangements and hotel accommodations for the tour. An alleged insider told the Post:

“There is a lot of tension and fighting going on right now. Roger is furious with Pete. Pete has been writing all this new material and wants to perform the new stuff, but Roger wants to stick with 'My Generation,' 'Won't Get Fooled Again,' 'Pinball Wizard' and other classics.”

Years ago, after a spat with Daltrey over whether or not the band should receive profits from a webcast of their concert, which were supposed to go to charity, Townshend took the fight public. The guitarist called out his colleague on his web site, writing:

“Roger is my partner in The Who. He is not my partner in anything else. We love each other but we are not regular social buddies like Bono and The Edge, we do not discuss or share ideas, and we have no unified joint vision of strategy for The Who or for creative projects in general.”

Townshend even went so far as to set up an email address for fans to write Daltrey and complain directly. Yikes! Not surprisingly, these are both examples of what not to do when you do not get along with a coworker. Instead, experts advise that you find other ways to handle your creative differences:

1. Try not to let the person you dislike hijack your psychological space.
You wouldn’t let someone push you around physically, so don’t let someone push you around psychologically, says Dr. James Campbell Quick, the Goolsby distinguished professor of psychology at University of Texas at Arlington. “You really need a psychological boundary with the bully,” Quick says. “I only give [difficult people] 50% of my mind – I don’t listen hard or deeply because it’s too irritating. I stay focused on what I’m doing. The other part of my mind is on my focus and my business.”

Quick recommends reading The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker, and Keeping Your Cool Under Fire: Non-Defensive Communication, by Theodora Wells, for further reading on psychological self-preservation.

2. Enlist a “toxic handler” to talk sense into both sides.
If co-workers dislike each other so much that they can’t listen to each other, they may need intervention from a respected colleague or friend who can be the “toxic handler” and talk some sense into everybody. Bob Sutton, Stanford professor and author, says the toxic handler should be “one person who everybody respects, somebody who’s trusted in the middle who can cool people out.”

3. Don't be afraid to push back.
“You may need to give [difficult co-workers] a little… treatment back,” says Dr. Quick. While Quick says he doesn’t recommend overly passive or overly aggressive behavior in the workplace as your only strategy, a difficult co-worker may leave you alone if you “bark back and bark back loud.”

4. Establish ground rules for working together.
It sounds simplistic, but establishing a rule against eye-rolling or raising voices will establish guidelines about acceptable behavior in the workplace. “The only hope is to try to set some ground rules in advance – some ground rules of mutual respect,” says Sutton. For The Who, not trashing each other on the Internet might be a good one.

5. Just grin and bear it (while you look for a new job).
Some people just won’t change and you should not necessarily expect them to. “Your co-workers are not your boyfriend, they’re not your parent – they’re your co-workers,” says Art Brief, an organizational psychologist at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. It is possible that telling a co-worker you don’t like their behavior will embarrass them and cause them to stop. But Brief says most people are too afraid to speak up for fear they’ll be seen as “not a team player” or a “troublemaker.” He suggests the beleaguered “carefully and sensitively express their concern – and then grin and bear it.”

(And, don't get fooled again!)