# The Ability to Work with Others: What It Is and How to Build It Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/ability-to-work-with-others/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/ability-to-work-with-others.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving teamwork at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The ability to work with others is a set of learnable behaviors: doing your part, building trust, listening and disagreeing well. Here's what each involves. ## Key facts - Title: The Ability to Work with Others: What It Is and How to Build It - Category: Soft Skills at Work - Primary skill: Teamwork - Related skills: Communication, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: ability to work with others - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/ability-to-work-with-others/ ## What this page covers - The ability to work with others is a set of learnable behaviors: doing your part, building trust, listening and disagreeing well. Here's what each involves. - Practical guidance for ability to work with others - How this topic connects to Teamwork ## Detailed explanation The ability to work with others is a set of everyday behaviors that let you get shared work done with colleagues while keeping those working relationships healthy: doing your part reliably, sharing what you know, communicating clearly, and disagreeing about the work without making it personal. It is not a personality trait, and every part of it can be practiced. That is useful to know if the phrase keeps turning up in job ads, interview questions and reviews, and you are not sure what would count as proof that you have it. The place to start is that the ability has two sides, and most people are noticeably stronger on one of them. ## What the ability to work with others actually covers Research on teamwork keeps two families of behavior apart. In the framework Rousseau and colleagues set out in 2006, one family regulates the team's performance: preparing the work, collaborating on tasks, assessing results and adjusting when plans change. The other maintains the team itself, through support for one another and handling conflict in a way that brings people together rather than splitting them. The distinction matters because it is entirely possible to deliver every task on time and still be only half of a good collaborator. If the relationships around you are left to wear thin, the work eventually suffers too. The five dimensions below cover both sides. The first is mostly about the work, the next two run through both, and the last two are mostly about how people experience working with you. ### Collaborating on the task This is the performance side: coordinating who does what, keeping others informed about where your part stands, and delivering what you committed to when you said you would. Colleagues judge your ability to work with others first and most often by whether the piece they are waiting for arrives. Sharing is part of it as well, in both directions. Telling others what you know saves them time, and asking for what they know saves you time. Many new employees hold back on the second half, because [asking a colleague](/knowledge/teamwork/ask-for-help-at-work/) for their material can feel like admitting you cannot manage alone. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described that feeling exactly, after a university where, for her, sharing material had felt off-limits: > Going to a colleague and asking, 'Do you have anything on rivers for biology that I could use?' was really scary. At university, sharing your material wasn't OK. So if you don't know that it's fine to share at work, asking for someone else's material can make you really anxious. At work, the opposite holds. Knowledge that stays with one person slows the whole group down, and asking a colleague what they have already built is part of doing your job well, not a confession that you can't. ### Building and keeping trust Trust is the maintenance side, and it is built from plain things: doing what you say you will do, meaning what you say, and letting a colleague's mistake go once it has been dealt with. It grows slowly and can be lost quickly, which is why reliability on small commitments counts for more than one impressive contribution. Trust also shapes how safe people feel to speak up. Team-development research summarized by Lacerenza and colleagues in 2018 links an environment where people can [raise problems and admit uncertainty](/knowledge/teamwork/psychological-safety/) with fewer interpersonal conflicts. The mechanism is straightforward: when it is safe to say "I'm not sure" or "I think this is going wrong," problems surface early as questions about the work instead of building into resentment. Even as the newest person in a group, you contribute to that safety through how you react when someone else admits a mistake or asks a basic question. ### Communicating clearly and listening Communication is the channel both sides run through. Coordination happens because someone states clearly what they need and by when; relationships hold because people feel listened to. Expressing your ideas and opinions clearly, listening actively and giving feedback are the means by which work gets coordinated, relationships get built and conflicts get resolved. The same skills carry over to friendships and family life. Listening matters most with colleagues who think differently from you, which in most workplaces is nearly everyone. Someone trained in another field, or simply used to another way of working, will frame a problem differently. Listening to understand how they got to their view, before deciding whether you agree, is what turns that difference into a better result instead of a standoff. ### Handling disagreement constructively Disagreement about the work itself, about what to do, how to do it and in which order, is a normal and often useful part of working together. Friction about the person is something else: it damages trust and makes the next round of cooperation harder. Keeping these two apart is one of the clearest markers of a strong ability to work with others. Many people early in their careers get this wrong in one of two directions. Some avoid disagreeing at all, hoping to seem easy to work with, and the group loses a view it needed. Others let a dispute about the work slide into something personal. The more useful pattern sits between them: say what you think, keep it about the work, and once the group has decided, commit to the decision even if it was not the one you argued for. ### Everyday conduct and flexibility Much of what people mean by "works well with others" shows up in small, repeated behavior rather than in big moments. The Missouri Department of Transportation, for example, describes interpersonal working relationships through attributes such as interacting well with others, managing conflict, respecting differing opinions and flexibility. Every one of these is something a colleague can observe, and something you can practice. The common barriers are habits of attention rather than gaps in talent: focusing mainly on your own wants and priorities, fearing being proven wrong, or assuming your way is the better one. Because they are habits, they can be noticed and changed. A colleague who catches themselves defending a point mainly to avoid being wrong has already found the thing to work on. ## Why employers weigh the ability to work with others so heavily Almost all entry-level work is done alongside other people, so an employer hiring someone at the start of their career needs evidence that the person can contribute inside a group, not only on their own. In NACE's Job Outlook 2020 survey, 86.3% of employers said they look for the ability to work in a team on a [candidate's resume](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/), second only to problem-solving skills at 91.2%. The ranking has held steady. In NACE's Job Outlook 2025 survey, as reported by the NIH Office of Intramural Training & Education, teamwork again sat among the skills employers consider most essential in new hires, alongside problem-solving in first place and written communication. That stability suggests it reflects how work is organized, not a hiring fashion. For you, it means the ability is not an optional extra on an application. It is one of the first things a recruiter looks for, and one of the easiest to strengthen once you know what it consists of. ## How to show your ability to work with others and build it Because the ability is hard to see on paper, employers usually test it with [behavioral interview questions](/knowledge/teamwork/teamwork-examples-for-interview/): tell us about a time you worked in a group, handled a disagreement, or helped a colleague who was stuck. What the interviewer wants is a specific example of what you did, not an adjective. Calling yourself a team player proves nothing; describing how you noticed two people duplicating the same analysis, suggested splitting it and set up a shared file proves several of the dimensions above at once. That gives you a practical way to build the ability and to show it. Take the five dimensions and, for each, look for a real moment from a job, a group project or a volunteer role where you did it well. Where you find one easily, you have an interview answer. Where you struggle, you have found the side you are weaker on, and that is the one to practice deliberately over the next few weeks: pick one behavior, such as confirming deadlines out loud or asking one more question before disagreeing, and repeat it until it becomes routine. If you would like a clearer picture before an interviewer asks, a short self-assessment can help you [spot your strongest collaboration habits](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) so you know which examples to lead with. ## What makes working alongside others go well Look back at the five dimensions and something stands out: almost none of them depends on being outgoing, popular or naturally easygoing. They depend on how you handle the team's work, how you talk and listen, and how you conduct yourself day to day. **Teamwork** is the most direct match. It asks you to think about where the group needs you rather than what makes you look good, to give credit to the team, and to keep a disagreement on the topic instead of the person. It also asks for something many newcomers find hard: speaking up when you disagree, and then loyally carrying out the decision the group makes. Trust comes from that kind of sincerity and reliability, not from being liked. **Communication** decides whether collaboration actually happens or just gets talked about. For working with others, the moves that matter are listening with a genuine wish to understand, stating your view clearly and directly, and voicing disagreement in a way that keeps the conversation about the work. These are in-the-moment habits, not scripts, and they grow quickly with practice. **Professional Behaviors** cover the small signals colleagues take as evidence that you are good to work with: treating everyone with the same respect whatever their role, showing real interest in their work, saying thank you, and staying open when things change. Equally telling is what you avoid, such as sitting back without contributing, or letting complaining become your default tone. The **free Job Skills Test** looks at all three of these, and at **the nine other work skills that sit beside them**, so you can [see which skill to practice first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/). A lower score on any of them simply marks where your effort will pay off soonest, since each one is built through practice. ## Where you already stand Some of this probably describes how you already work on a good day. If you have ever noticed that a group project ran more smoothly once someone wrote down who was doing what, or found yourself rephrasing a point because a classmate clearly heard it differently, you have seen these skills from the inside. What you do with that is up to you. A weaker side is not a flaw in who you are; it is a set of habits you have not practiced yet, and you can build them without becoming more talkative or less yourself. As your work comes to depend on more people, how you collaborate tends to decide more of what you can get done, which makes now a good moment to find out where you stand. ## Find out where your collaboration skills stand All that is left is to see which of your work skills are already strong and which deserve your attention. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve and points to the ones that will make the biggest difference to how you work with others. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The ability to work with others is a set of learnable behaviors: doing your part, building trust, listening and disagreeing well. Here's what each involves. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Teamwork. It also relates to Communication, Professional Behaviors. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/ability-to-work-with-others/ Preferred summary: "The ability to work with others is a set of learnable behaviors: doing your part, building trust, listening and disagreeing well. Here's what each involves." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.