Five seconds gone, and you just know it. This is going to be a very professional meeting. Polite, efficient, and nobody finishes anybody’s sentences.
Then there is the other kind. Five seconds in, you know that too. This is going to be one of those “we’ll be finishing each other’s sentences” work relationships. Two weeks from now we will be telling each other everything about work, the good, the bad and the ugly, like two colourful singing canaries in the same cage. A work spouse, a work bestie, whatever the office calls it this week. None of it means we have to become best pals. It is a work thing.
You do not get a vote. The calendar invite arrives either way.
Chemistry is a bonus
Psychologists who study chemistry describe something that emerges between two people. A sense of shared identity, positive feeling, and a feeling that you are coordinating towards the same goal (Reis, Regan and Lyubomirsky, 2022). It belongs to the pair, not to either person. I suspect a good part of it is pace, humour and directness happening to line up.
So it is partly luck. A job should not depend on luck.
What the job needs
McAllister studied 194 managers and professionals in 1995 and found two kinds of trust. One rests on reliability, dependability and competence. The other rests on mutual care and concern. The first is the baseline for working together. The second grows with time and contact, if it grows at all. Later reviews say the two overlap more than the neat split suggests, so treat it as a way of thinking, not a law.
In practice, “I can rely on you” means you do what you said, you tell me early when you won’t, and I know who decides what. All of that can be built with someone you would never have lunch with. None of it requires food or chemistry.
A first impression is a first guess
The five-second verdict feels like knowledge. It is a first guess with excellent PR.
Mine has been right most of the time. Not always, and it fails in both directions. I once told someone that when we first met I thought he was an arrogant brick, and that he turned out to be a nice dude. I have also had it the other way round. Someone seemed like a nice person, and within a week or two they turned out to be a complete nightmare.
Both times the feeling was fairly confident and wrong. There is a related effect. Boothby and colleagues found in 2018 that after a conversation, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them. For new flatmates the gap lasted most of the school year. A later study found it in work groups too. So you can misjudge them, and you can misjudge what they think of you.
That is why I trust the track record more than the feeling. McAllister’s baseline is something you can observe, and the feeling is not.
Finding a way, on an ordinary Tuesday
Mostly it is small stuff, and none of it is chemistry. Who decides what, so nobody has to win an argument to get moving. Where a disagreement gets said: to the person, early, in the room, not in the corridor afterwards. Whether there is a check-in, even ten minutes, so small things do not set. A team who have answered those questions do not need to like each other much to get the work done.
Then there is the one that is easiest to skip: saying how you work. How fast, how direct, what the silence means. “I go quiet when I am thinking, not when I am annoyed” can save months of guessing.
And when it stalls, someone names it. “We keep missing each other on this” is easier to fix than a feeling.
Who bends
Watch who always adapts. “Find a way” can quietly mean that the same person adjusts every time, usually the one with less power, or the one who cannot stand friction. That is the loyalty trap in a smaller coat. If only one of you ever adjusts, that is not getting along. It is one person paying for it.
Which is why the person with more power should adapt first.
For a leader, it is in the job description
A leader does not get to opt out, and does not get to wait for the other person to adapt first. Getting the work done between people who do not click is part of the job, and so is working with the people above and beside you who irritate you. You cannot order chemistry. You can make it unnecessary: clear owners, clear decision rights, one-on-ones that happen.
And the room is watching. Everyone sees who the leader gets along with, and they watch more closely who the leader does not. They also see where the irritation goes. If a leader says it to the person, early, in the room, everyone learns that is how it is done here. If it goes to a peer over coffee, they learn that too.
The limit
“Get along with everyone” has a limit. A difference in style is something you can negotiate. Being belittled, undermined or lied to is not a style. Enduring is not the same as getting along, though the two look identical in a team photo. Draw the line before you need it.
The one you don’t click with
They may be the most useful person in the room. Someone who sees it differently is a chance to find out what you missed, and the colleague who always agrees with you is unlikely to give you that.
Five seconds might tell you how it feels. It does not tell you how it will go. You may get the very professional meeting or the colourful singing canaries, and the collaboration can be good either way.
The calendar invite arrives either way. Accept it.
