I usually spend over a year getting to know people before I start a project with them. Why so cautious? I've learned life is too short to spend time working with people who you don't enjoy spending time and trust. It is hard to be creative when your co-workers are looking out for their own interests and don't have your back. One of the best guys to work with was my departed friend Olivier Sanche, and I wrote about the concept of a wingman watching your back.
Data Center Wingman, who has your back? One of the best Olivier Sanche
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 2011 AT 9:52AMOlivier and I spent a lot of time together and one of the ways you could describe our relationship is we were wingman for each other.
A common assumption is a bad boss can be bad for your health, but what about your co-workers. WSJ has an article that discusses how your co-workers can affect your health.
Your Co-Workers Might Be Killing You
Hours don't affect health much—but unsupportive colleagues do
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Instead, the Israeli scientists found that the factor most closely linked to health was the support of co-workers: Less-kind colleagues were associated with a higher risk of dying. While this correlation might not be surprising, the magnitude of the effect is unsettling. According to the data, middle-age workers with little or no "peer social support" in the workplace were 2.4 times more likely to die during the study.
But, you know what can be worse than your co-workers. How about the computer system that treats the individual as a cog.
But that wasn't the only noteworthy finding. The researchers also complicated longstanding ideas about the relationship between the amount of control experienced by employees and their long-term health. Numerous studies have found that the worst kind of workplace stress occurs when people have little say over their day. These employees can't choose their own projects or even decide which tasks to focus on first. Instead, they must always follow the orders of someone else. They feel like tiny cogs in a vast corporate machine.
The things that you may think affect your health long hours and the boss were not shown to worsen your health.
The first thing the researchers discovered is that a lot of the variables they assumed would matter had no measurable impact. The number of hours a person spent at the office didn't affect his or her longevity, nor did the niceness of the boss.