"I never met a man I didn't like" - Will Rogers. In this quote, Mr. Rogers was actually referring to Leon Trotsky (revolutionary and founder and leader of the Red Army) and the rest of the quote is as follows: "I bet you if I had met him and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I didn't like.” When you meet people, no matter what opinion you may have formed about them beforehand, … after you meet them and see their angle and their personality, … you can see a lot of good in all of them."

You see, Rogers took the time to get to know people, what made them tick, what made them unique, and he found at least one admirable trait or characteristic in each of the people he met - although sometimes that took some effort. If you look at our "modern" society we have a very much of a “microwave mentality,” in which we make judgments and assumptions about people very quickly. If we're wrong about them, we spend very little time thinking about what our assumptions and judgments have done to that person.

Let's take our aesthetic judgments for example. You see somebody who is fat and you simply assume they're greedy and eat too much because they enjoy it. But you rarely think about what drives that person to eat that way - do they eat for comfort, for example? Does that man or woman have a genetic predisposition to obesity?

Here's another example. How about if you meet a person who has really bad acne, even in their adult years? Do you assume that they just don't wash themselves properly, or that they eat a diet filled with fatty food? Without knowing their medical history, you can never know what is causing their skin problems.

Keeping an open mind about the people you meet or work with each day is the key to finding their virtues and the things you'll like most about them. Even if this person has disappointed you or caused you problems in the past, every person deserves the benefit of the doubt, and for them to be given an opportunity to show you how they can excel in specific areas of life and in work.

Project-based work can really help you see where a person's strengths and weaknesses are. So, for example, the 'natural leaders' tend to come to the fore, your 'creative' people are there to give you 1,000 ideas a minute, and the 'project manager' type of people are happily adding structure to the whole thing.

Want a way to engage someone you may have a bad feeling about, but you know you have to work with? It's an unpleasant situation, but there's a way to flip it in your favor.

Here's how. Have an off-site team day, where you get to see how this person or these people behave outside of work. A lot of people have a work "face" and a separate "face" or persona for their real lives and until you know both sides to a person don't be too quick to judge them. A picnic is a safe call, but the bar could be even better! Who said going out shouldn't be a way to socialize, even if it's about work?