Many great friendships share their origins in “what” or shared experiences like same school, same neighborhood, etc. Friendships are purely optional in a sense. If both of you want to play, you have a great game. And if you don’t, too bad. You’ll find another partner.
Friendships are inherently flexible. You can have great friends united in the “how” i.e. friends who follow the same thinking/decision making process or in the “why” i.e. similar purposes, dreams, and goals.
We often think the rules that apply to friendship should work just well at work. They don’t. A shared experience rarely makes a great team member. They can help strengthen bonds between team members (remembering that experience in the trenches) but they don’t make working with each other any better. Great companies build cultures that bring together people with similar “why’s”. So, that’s often take care of as well.
The difficulty lies in aligning the “how.” If how you approach tasks and projects, how you make decisions, how you communicate is incompatible, it’s not going to work. There may have been many who shared Steve Jobs’ vision of changing the world but aligning the “how” to actually make a working relationship successful was not for everyone.
If we want to be able to pick great bosses to work with, great teammates, we need to be as self aware as possible – to understand our “how” and look for others who align with it. The rest follows.
A Learning a Day 