<p>Research says humility is the key to winning over colleagues.</p>

- Julia Glum

WANT YOUR COWORKERS to like you? Never microwave fish for lunch, leave your passive-aggressive tendencies at home, and don’t forget to talk about your failures.

That last tip comes straight from Harvard Business School, where a team of researchers recently found that managers who mention their mistakes faceless resentment from colleagues.

First, the team at Harvard sought to verify that people are indeed less likely to disclose their failures than their successes. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program, which pays regular people to take surveys, the researchers asked 150 participants about their accomplishments and whom they’d told about them. The results confirmed their hypothesis.

After establishing that baseline, the researchers looked at whether revealing failures along with successes actually made onlookers less envious. Again using MTurk, the team had about 300 subjects enter demographic information and read short biographies of fictional peers.

In some, only successes—like awards or high salaries—were revealed. In others, both successes and failures were included. People who read the successes-and failures biographies had fewer feelings of envy than the ones who had read about only successes.

The researchers then asked about 80 entrepreneurs to listen to an audio recording of someone else’s pitch. Some versions of the script included only successes, like, “I have already landed some huge clients—companies like Google and GE.” Others included victories and failures,