7 Ways to be an Awesome Person to Work With

1. Be excited to work with other people.

If you’re always more excited to work/meet with the other person, they’re sure to have a great time meeting/working with you. When you go to a restaurant and a server is happy, it’s contagious, the same goes for when you meet with someone. If you’re happy and have a positive outlook on things, it’s difficult for others not to have the same view. As the song goes… don’t worry, be happy.

2. Start saying “Yes, and…” instead of “No, but…”

Look at ideas given from other people as ways they are trying to help your organization. If you’re an owner/manager you want to encourage ideas to help the business to be proactive and move forward. You’re naive to think you yourself are going to have all the best ideas for your company so encourage idea generation. In fact encourage bad idea generation, because to have some truly great ideas you must have a lot ideas that won’t work whatsoever. No one only comes up with good ideas, if someone tells you different I would suggest they might in fact be clinically insane.

3. A lesson from Dale Carnegie, become genuinely interested in other people.

When talking to other people try to be the person asking questions and the listening more of the time than being the ones who’s talking. You’d be surprised what you can learn about other people when you take the time to ask them questions on a personal level and really make an attempt to get to know them. When you understand someone on a personal level you can have a deeper sense of empathy which will in turn help you make better decisions when you want to help them in some capacity.

4. For gosh sakes you have to have fun, there’s no way around it.

If you really want the high performing office or work place you only dream about you must have fun at work, or at least try to. If your workplace isn’t fun to be at, why would your employees want to stay working there? Just for a paycheck? That’s a bad place to be in when people are just working for the money.

5. Smile, a lot. 

Every chance you have smile. People like positive people, if you’re smiling it seems like you’re in a good/happy mood, that’s very attractive to other people.  But make sure the smile is authentic, it’s very easy to notice when you’re trying to fake a smile so don’t. Try to be genuinely happy. If you’re not a naturally happy person, I suggest visiting the Onion.com, Reddiy.com/r/funny, or search America’s funniest home videos on Youtube daily and you’ll start to at least laugh a bit more.

6. Look like someone you’d want to hang around with.

Fashion is often over-looked in the world of business but it plays a key role. It’s not difficult to dress nice, you just have to make an effort to do so. In Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” he presents the theory on how important first impressions really are.  You have one shot at it, if you look esthetically pleasing, unconsciously strangers begin to like you. In Robert Cialdini’s “Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion” it says

“Research has shown that we automatically assign to good-looking individuals such favorable traits as talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence. Furthermore, we make these judgements without being aware that physical attractiveness plays a role in the process. – For example, a study of the Canadian federal elections found that attractive candidates received more than two and a half times as many votes as unattractive candidates.”

You see, if you take some time to ensure you look more than presentable it will have a long term positive benefit on how people perceive you. If perception is reality, and you can change the perception people have of you, that means you can change the reality of how people think of you. Deep, I know.

7. Do not be a negative nancy.

You know, those people who always find the worst in others? Always gossiping about someone else and complaining about how life is so much harder for them. If you find yourself ever complaining to someone at work stop and ask yourself if this person really needs an invite to your pity party. Now I’m not saying to talk about things that are bothering you, just talk about them in private to a close friend, lover or relative, keep the negative conversations completely out of the work place.

Have I missed one?  Let me know what you think makes it fun to work with people in the comments below.