How to Work With Anyone

A key skill to unlocking your career

Feb 20, 2026

Every year for the past 11 years, I have spoken in Professor Pfeffer’s class, Paths to Power, at Stanford. He has been instrumental in my career both as a mentor and as a friend. It is thanks to him that I ended up writing my book, Take Back Your Power. During that class, someone asked us, “What is the most important skill to have?” One of the other panelists said something that I absolutely agree with, and that’s what I’m writing about today.

Cooperation is an Option Until it Becomes a Necessity

One of the most important skills in a long career is learning how to work with anyone. Yet it is also one of the least talked about, perhaps because it feels so obvious on the surface, but so difficult in practice.

Early in your career, this skill does not feel particularly important. When you are an individual contributor, especially just out of school, you often have many options. You can join Team A instead of Team B, work on Product X rather than Product Y, or move between areas that interest you. Large organizations tend to offer many teams, many managers, and many paths forward, and if a particular dynamic or relationship does not work, there is usually a way to change it by just moving teams or assignments.

As you rise, those choices quietly begin to disappear. Once you become a manager, there may only be one or two roles at your level, and as you move further into senior leadership, you often take on responsibilities that are truly “an N of One” roles, with no parallel position and no obvious lateral move. At that point, the ability to make the role work becomes existential because if you cannot succeed there, there is nowhere else to go.

This is even more acute when you get to the top. You rarely get to choose your investors, boards, and your C-suite peers. The group of people you need to work with narrows, and your control over who you have to work with is nonexistent.

And yet, we spend surprisingly little time talking about how to actually work with people.

The Unglamorous Reality of Cooperation

We talk endlessly about leadership, vision, influence, and executive presence, but we rarely talk about the day-to-day reality of working with people who think differently than we do, who operate with different incentives, or who may even seem to actively resist our ideas. I wrote recently about making friends at work, and while this topic is related, it is not the same thing. This is not about being social or universally liked. It is about learning how to work productively with almost anyone.

I am also not talking about truly destructive people. Narcissists, abusive managers, or people who intentionally undermine others do exist, but in more than twenty years of working across companies, boards, and leadership teams, I have encountered very few people who genuinely fall into that category. Most difficult situations are far more nuanced than that.

In most cases, people are rational actors responding to abitions, pressures, and fears that are not always visible from the outside. They have working styles that differ from ours, they are motivated by things that may not motivate us, and when we misread those dynamics, we often assume bad intent when the reality is simple misalignment.

As you become more senior, you also lose the ability to choose all of the parameters around you. When you join a board, the board already exists. When you join a management team, you do not get to choose your peers. When you are hired into a product area, you are often the last person to join (unless you started it yourself). At that point, the question is no longer whether you can choose who you work with, but whether you can learn how to work effectively with the people in front of you.

There are a handful of practices that have consistently helped me do exactly that.

1. Begin with empathy

The first is to start by understanding what people value, which usually means starting with incentives rather than personalities. What are they trying to accomplish, how are they measured, and where do they want to go next? This sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to skip, especially when collaboration feels strained. When things are not working, we tend to focus on what we need, what our team needs, and why the other person is being difficult, rather than pausing to ask what might be driving their behavior.

I once worked with someone who seemed actively hostile toward my team, and for a long time, I could not understand why. Meetings were tense, decisions dragged, and collaboration felt far harder than it needed to be. Eventually, I learned that this person had recently been passed over for promotion, in large part because their manager believed they had a poor working relationship with my team and that their success depended heavily on us. From their perspective, we were not peers or collaborators, but an obstacle standing between them and their next step.

Once I understood that, my approach changed completely. Instead of treating the situation as a conflict to be managed, I said, “Let’s get you there together,” and we had an honest conversation about what success would look like for both of us. The relationship shifted almost immediately, not because anyone had changed their personality, but because we had finally aligned on incentives. This was not a bad person. It was a frustrated one, and I had simply failed to see it.

2. Find commonality

Another powerful lever is finding common ground, which often matters more than we expect, even when it seems small or irrelevant to the work itself. Imagine walking into a room where someone is indifferent toward you or openly skeptical, and then discovering that you grew up in the same place, went to the same university, or worked at the same company earlier in your career. Or maybe you have kids of the same age or have the same hobby. Something subtle but meaningful shifts in that moment, because you move from being an abstract counterpart to being someone familiar standing on common ground.

This is not about forcing connection or manufacturing rapport. It is about being genuinely curious and paying attention to the details people share along the way. Those small moments are often the fastest path to trust, and when people feel even a sense of shared identity, conversations are richer, and collaboration becomes easier.

Equally important is taking the time to get to know the person, not just the role they play at work. We like to pretend that work is just work, but it never really is. People bring their full lives into the office, whether we acknowledge it or not. They carry ambitions, disappointments, joys, and losses that shape how they show up every day, even when those things have nothing to do with the job itself.

Making space for that does not mean oversharing or crossing boundaries. It can be as simple as asking about a weekend, celebrating a child getting into college, or showing up with empathy when someone is going through something hard. If work were only about executing tasks, AI could replace all of us tomorrow. What makes collaboration effective and meaningful is the relationship and the trust that comes from seeing each other as whole people.

3. Share the praise

Another lesson that took me longer than it should have to learn is the importance of making other people look good. This is one of the most powerful and underused leadership tools I know. I once read a line that said there is no upper limit to how much praise people can absorb, and while I laughed at the time, experience has shown me how true it is, when that praise is genuine and specific.

My team once hit a major milestone, and we did what many teams do. We celebrated internally, told the story of our success, and moved on. What we failed to do was thank the teams whose work made that success possible, particularly the platform and infrastructure teams whose contributions were essential but largely invisible. Unsurprisingly, they did not see our success as their success because we had never made that connection explicit.

The next time, we were intentional about doing it differently. We included those teams in the celebration, publicly acknowledged their contributions, and made it clear that without their work, none of what we had accomplished would have been possible. The difference in how they engaged with us afterward was immediate. Credit is infinitely divisible, praise costs nothing, and when people feel genuinely seen, they show up differently.

4. Take a team posture

Finally, I have learned that sometimes collaboration breaks down not because of disagreement, but because of posture. There is a physical metaphor I learned from Chris Cox that I return to often: When people sit across from each other, they naturally fall into debate mode. When they sit at an angle, they tend to have a conversation. When they sit on the same side, they are looking at the future together. The same dynamic exists emotionally. If people feel they are across from you, they prepare to defend. If they feel you are beside them, they begin to build.

Bringing people to your side does not mean avoiding hard conversations or pretending disagreements do not exist. It means framing challenges as shared problems and successes as shared wins, and making it clear through both words and actions that you want the people around you to succeed and that you are willing to stand with them when things get difficult.