The Colleague I Disliked Who Taught Me More Than Anyone I Have Liked

Neil and I joined the architecture firm in Exeter in the same month, which meant that the comparison was immediate and somewhat unavoidable. We were different in almost every professional dimension. I worked with a thoroughness and a respect for process that I considered professional standards and that Neil treated as excessive.

Neil worked with an improvisational speed and a comfort with ambiguity that I found slipshod and that appeared, in the firm's esteem, to produce results that were regarded well. I found him careless. He found me, I eventually learned, exhausting.

For the first year I managed my dislike with the ordinary professional efficiency of someone who can be civil indefinitely as long as they do not have to be more than civil.

At month fourteen we were assigned as co-leads on a project that required daily collaboration, which removed the option of managed civility and required something more functional. The first two months of that collaboration were the most professionally uncomfortable of my career.

Not because of any open conflict - we were both too professional for that - but because of the sustained friction of two people whose working styles were genuinely incompatible trying to produce a shared output.

The resolution, which took longer than it should have, came through a conversation neither of us had been willing to initiate and that was eventually forced by our project supervisor, who pointed out with diplomatic precision that the project was suffering from the gap between our approaches.

In that conversation I heard, for the first time with any receptivity, how Neil's approach looked from inside it rather than from outside mine. His speed was not carelessness - it was a different risk calculation that produced rough work quickly and refined it through iteration.

His comfort with ambiguity was not slipshod - it was a tolerance for the unfinished state that my need for completion was preventing in our shared work. I learned things from working with Neil that working with people I admired had not produced, because admired people confirm what you already believe and disagreeable people offer something more disruptive and more useful.