If you are allowed to feel passionate about your work, why can’t you feel intense dislike for colleagues?

LAST WEEK I met a couple of girlfriends for dinner. We conversationally sprinted over work, men and family before settling on to our new favourite subject: the woman my friend hates at work.

This woman – let’s call her Louise – has become so irritating to my friend, and has been rendered in such painstaking detail to us, that I cringe inside whenever I hear Louise’s name. She has become my friend’s office equivalent of an ex-boyfriend.

Someone you have fallen so out of love with that their every breath makes your skin crawl, and you daydream of dashing their head against the wall.

The difference being, of course, that my friend has never been in love with Louise. In fact, she has always hated everything about her. From her long, swishy skirts and giant mugs of tea cradled to her chest, to the way she sits really close when she wants to speak to you.

Hatred is not an admirable emotion. The loser is usually the hater rather than the hated. But to imagine it doesn’t exist in the workplace is like saying no one has affairs in the office. If you are allowed to feel passionate about your work, why can’t you feel intense dislike for colleagues? There are all sorts of ugly reasons for hating people at work. One friend in advertising hates a colleague who does a similar job. Put bluntly, she is jealous because her rival is incredibly organised and efficient, is regularly described as a “high flyer” and puts my friend to shame.

Another friend thinks open-plan offices that dump unrelated departments next to each other foster grievances. You sit near people you don’t work with but you have to hear them and see them all the time. Every day.

And so you focus on niggly conversational tics and sartorial twirls. He now has a deep dislike for a man whose Bluetooth headset is welded to his head.

The problem for my Louise-hating friend is that no one in her mid-sized accountancy firm shares her depth of antipathy.

“Mild indifference” probably sums up best her colleagues’ attitudes to Louise. And this just makes the hatred my friend feels for Louise doubly worse.

I know how it feels. In a previous job at a university, I developed a hideously intense dislike for a colleague. One Friday night out at work drinks, as foreplay to the inevitable conversational climax – the people we fancied at work – the discussion trundled through lists of nice and horrible colleagues. “I’ll tell you who’s nice,” one ventured, “Gwyneth.”

“Are you kidding?” I objected. “Gwyneth is awful.”

But everyone was nodding and smiling.

“Yes, Gwyneth. What a lovely person.”

“So nice.”

“Isn’t she?”

No one had heard me.

So, it seemed, everyone loved Gwyneth; except for me. I hated Gwyneth. Gwyneth is not this person’s real name. I thought I should disguise their name in case a former colleague reads this. As far as I know I’ve never worked with a Gwyneth.

Actually, the real person’s a man.

Why could they not see the true horror that was Gwyneth? Gwyneth was horrible. This is the problem with work drinks. They can make you think even more about work than you do already.

I have sharp memories of how the conversational hangover made that weekend miserable. The spectre of my colleague grew and grew until it morphed into Mr Stay Puft, the 200ft marshmallow man in Ghostbusters. The whole weekend had been blighted by Gwyneth.

I resolved to tell her what I thought on Monday morning. Immediately after entering the office I bumped into Gwyneth.

What did I do? Nothing. Which was all very uptight of me. But it was also partly the fault of the workplace. This is not just a neat deflection on my part (although it is that as well). Part of the reason I didn’t like working in that department was that everyone was too polite and too consensual. Which is quite different from saying I enjoy conflict and rudeness.

Gwyneth was getting away with murder. Instead of doing the great projects he/she bragged incessantly about, he/she just bragged. It was this overly civilised atmosphere that also prevented me from speaking my mind. I like to think that now I am older and wiser things are different. But I am not so sure.

Binna Kandola, business psychologist, agrees that such an atmosphere inhibits honesty and encourages group-think: “People don’t want to speak out and be different. The Bay of Pigs is said to be a result of group-think because people were afraid to express opposing views.” I have a suspicion that the others didn’t like Gwyneth, but they chose to toe the party line. Maybe they did hear me, but they struggled with something that ran counter to received opinion.

Mr Kandola believes I should have confronted Gwyneth – a bit of grit between colleagues encourages people to speak their minds, a point brought home in Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincolnthat describes the enmity between various cabinet members.

However, if that fails, a London therapist says you could always try avoiding the person you hate. Or in my friend’s case, describe them in intense detail over dinner, so that everybody else hates them too. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009