How to Treat Your Enemies

Editor's note: Welcome to our weekly column on business etiquette. If you have a pressing question for Miss Conduct, please send her an email.

When she read that E.B. White observed, "One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy," Miss Conduct wanted to address this unseen menace to business productivity.

Now, Miss Conduct has no enemies -- at least that's her story and she's sticking to it -- so she asked two of her most gracious acquaintances about the topic. Since these friends also happen to be experts in very different types of business conduct -- initial salesmanship and turnaround management -- their experience represents the full chronology of commerce, too. They broke having an enemy down into two phases: before and after.

Pre-Enemy: Assess Personalities

It's universally agreed that it's best if your enemies don't know they're your enemies, mostly because it makes you a more formidable adversary yourself. So how do we keep from making enemies in the first place?

On the one hand, Nicholas Boothman, author of How to Connect in Business in 90 Seconds or Less, recommends we conduct ourselves with the principle of completion in mind. "Some people want more than anything to feel powerful, some want to feel important, some crave recognition for their intelligence, some people want to feel valued and accepted," Boothman says. "When you can complete or validate that particular feeling, you have a connection with them."

More significantly for this discussion, Boothman warns against stepping on someone's emotional minefields that will disconnect you from them.

So figure out which principal of completion applies. Is your colleague more socially reserved or outgoing; more rational or more emotional? Combining the answers to this question is the key to figuring out his or her value system.

According to what Boothman and many other sales professionals employ, reserved, rational "analyst" people want to be known as intelligent, so never embarrass them. Reserved, emotional "supporter" people want to be valued, so never reject them. Outgoing, rational "controllers" want to feel powerful, so never undermine them. The outgoing, emotional "promoter" personality wants to feel important, so Boothman counsels, "ignore or disapprove of him at your peril."