While misery may love company, long term it’s not the company you
want to be keep. The simplest of Carnegie’s advice was to smile. Most
people prefer to work with people who aren’t always lamenting how the
world has done them wrong.
To quote Carnegie, “Show respect for the other person’s opinions.
Never say ‘You’re wrong.’” This is the most difficult soft skill for
many of us to pick up. We all have an inner know-it-all who feels like
correcting trivial things: Lance Armstrong won seven consecutive
Tour-de-France competitions before being stripped of his titles, not
eight! But unless you’re working as a fact-checker, it probably doesn’t
matter, and it’s unlikely that someone will say “You know that woman who
corrected everything I said? I really want to work with her!” This goes
for bigger matters too. If an employee does something wrong, don’t harp
on it. Tell her how to do it right. “Praise every improvement,”
Carnegie noted. Then people keep wanting to improve.
Carnegie told people to “appeal to the nobler motives” and it’s not a
bad idea. You can assume in your interactions with people that they’re
lazy, incompetent, or out to get you, but if you’re choosing to work
with someone, acting disdainful about the whole thing isn’t going to
make it easier. Up until the point a relationship cannot be sustained,
assuming that you are both trying to solve a problem together, and that
the other person wants to help solve the problem will often “arouse in
the other person an eager want”--as Carnegie put it--to do just that.
