I used to sit next to someone at work who liked their desk to be unnecessarily, pointlessly, excruciatingly tidy. That’s how I saw it anyway. All the files lined up, neat little coaster to put a coffee mug down on, every pen and hole puncher and paperclip exactly in place. It followed through to the way he worked too. Everything had to be filed the instant he finished using it, all notes had to be made in the right colour pen, every email colour-coded and archived, detailed to-do lists all marked with codes to indicate priority, urgency and importance.

It drove me mad. He couldn’t do anything impulsively, or change direction in the middle of a task, or be spontaneous about following up ideas. Or cope with me dropping an untidy file on top of his perfect array of squared-up paperwork. I used to think it was absurd that he was stifling his own creativity and hamstringing his ability to be flexible.

But … As usual, I had to concede eventually that there was a but, and it was this. If there was a sudden emergency, guess who could always find the relevant email before anyone else? Who could be relied on to notice if the rest of us forgot some vital component of a task? Who could organise any event or project with superhuman efficiency? Who was always on time at every meeting with all the paperwork, and spare copies in case people like me had left theirs on their desks?

If I’m completely honest, for a long time I looked down on my colleague because he couldn’t generate ideas like I could, or get other departments to put themselves out for ours, or act spontaneously. But it wasn’t his precisely ordered desk that stopped him doing those things. He just wasn’t that kind of person. The desk was the most obvious indicator of who he was, and of his own particular skill set, which was very different from mine. And – I came to realise – at least as valuable as mine. Just different.

Almost all of us are guilty at times of thinking our way is best. And that people who are different from us are wrong – or at least less right than us. I remember at the age of about 12 staying over at a friend’s house and discovering that his family used a different brand of toothpaste from ours. I thought they were really weird – obviously our toothpaste was the best brand, or we wouldn’t use it. So why weren’t they using it too?

Like all this stuff, I know you know it really. It’s just easy to forget sometimes. When other people are driving us up the wall, it’s so much simpler to criticise them for being stupid or irrational or unreasonable than to consider that maybe their behaviour is actually quite legitimate but doesn’t happen to suit us. However, if you want to get the best out of people – for you as well as for them – you have to be firm with yourself about acknowledging that just because you don’t like something, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Once I finally accepted that my colleague was never going to have a messy desk like mine, and that actually that was OK, it was much easier to like him and appreciate him.