Dealing With Difficult People At Work
There’s a difference between someone having a difficult day and someone who is consistently difficult to deal with.
Most of us can overlook the occasional sharp response, disagreement, missed cue, or bad mood. We all have days when we are not at our best.
It becomes harder when one person’s behaviour starts consuming far more time, energy, and emotional attention than it should. You may notice:
- you begin preparing mentally before every interaction
- you avoid speaking openly
- that small issues become emotionally exhausting
- you replay what was said over and over again
Difficult people can show up anywhere in a workplace. They may be the colleague beside you, the employee you supervise, the manager you report to, a client, or someone in another department you regularly need to work with.
And they are not all difficult in the same way.
Some people need to control every decision. Others avoid anything uncomfortable. Some need constant attention or recognition, while others seem to find the problem in every possible solution. There are people who agree with everything but rarely follow through, and others who continually position themselves as the one being wronged.
That is one reason there is no single script for dealing with difficult people at work. What helps with someone who avoids conflict may be completely ineffective with someone who dominates it.
The challenge is recognizing what you are dealing with and choosing a response that gives the conversation the best chance of moving forward.
In Simple Terms:
Dealing with difficult people at work means recognizing patterns of behaviour that make interactions harder than they need to be, understanding what may be driving those patterns, and responding in a way that protects your own effectiveness while giving the relationship or conversation somewhere productive to go.
Why Dealing With Difficult People At Work Is So Draining
Have you noticed how much space dealing with difficult people at work can take up in our heads, even when the actual interaction was relatively brief?
You replay the conversation on the drive home. You think about what you should have said. You anticipate the next meeting and wonder which version of the person is going to show up.
Part of what makes dealing with difficult people at work so draining is the unpredictability. Someone may be perfectly reasonable one day and defensive the next. A simple request can turn into an argument, an excuse, a complaint, or complete avoidance.
After a while, we start adapting. We choose our words more carefully. We avoid certain subjects. We may even take on extra work because dealing with the person feels harder than simply doing it ourselves.
If your biggest challenge is how much space this person is taking up in your head, my 7 Reality Anchors™ for Dealing With Difficult People looks more closely at changing your own expectations, reactions, and perspective.
This is also where we can get stuck trying to figure the person out.
“Why do they always do this?”
“Why can’t they just see what they’re doing?”
“Why do they have to make everything so difficult?”
Those are understandable questions, but they rarely give us much to work with. A more useful place to start is noticing the pattern of behaviour in front of us, because different patterns call for different responses.
Difficult People Don’t All Behave the Same Way
In my presentations, my audiences have found it helpful to think about difficult behaviour in terms of the pattern that keeps showing up.
I use eight different types in my work. The names make them easier to remember, but it is the behaviour behind them that matters.
The Bull — Hostile Aggressive: Bulls tend to get things done through force and intimidation rather than diplomacy. They may become frustrated quickly, push hard for what they want, or use anger to take control of the situation.
The Turtle — Silent Unresponsive: Turtles withdraw. They keep their opinions to themselves, give you very little to work with, and can be incredibly difficult to draw into a conversation. Often, what they really want is to be left alone.
The Turkey — Whine and Complainer: Turkeys can find something wrong with almost anything. They criticize, blame, complain about how other people should behave, and often look for sympathy. The payoff is the attention their complaints generate.
The Peacock — Expert: Peacocks have been everywhere, done everything, and know everyone. They may downplay other people’s successes, steal the glory, find fault with ideas, or position themselves as the person who knows best. Recognition matters to them.
The Donkey — Doom and Gloomer: Donkeys have an intensely negative perspective and can be stubborn about it. They anticipate what will go wrong and may believe that the people making decisions simply don’t understand or don’t care. Their pessimism also helps keep expectations low.
The Puppy — Super Agreeable: Puppies are charming, apologetic, and eager to please. They volunteer for everything and have difficulty saying no, but following through can be another matter. When commitments aren’t met, there is often a creative excuse waiting. Their need for social connection and to be liked makes saying yes much easier than disappointing someone.
The Snake — Victimizer: Snakes are harder to see coming. They may wait for an opportunity to catch someone off guard, use questions designed to embarrass, make sarcastic comments, or work behind the scenes rather than addressing an issue directly. For the Snake, the payoff is power.
The Mouse — Avoider: Mice tend to run as soon as tension or conflict appears. They may become timid, internalize what is happening, take conflict personally, or stall rather than deal with the issue. Fear is often underneath the behaviour, and avoidance lets them escape the tension.
People don’t arrive at work neatly labelled as one type. We may see different patterns from the same person depending on the situation, and some behaviours become much more noticeable when people are under pressure.
The value in recognizing the pattern isn’t to label the person. It is to give us a better idea of what may be happening so that we don’t keep responding in ways that make the situation worse.
Why Your Response Needs to Match the Behaviour
What works with one difficult person can backfire with another.
Backing away from a Bull because they become aggressive may give them exactly the control they are looking for. Filling the silence when dealing with a Turtle makes it easier for them to remain silent. Giving a Turkey unlimited time to complain provides attention without ever getting to the problem that needs to be solved.
Sometimes the response is almost counterintuitive. With a Bull, you may need to let them let off some steam before confronting the issue assertively. With a Turtle, an open-ended question followed by silence may get you further than asking question after question. With a Peacock, acknowledging a legitimate accomplishment can make it easier to introduce a different point of view.
You don’t need to diagnose the person or figure out why they became this way. You need to recognize enough of the pattern to stop automatically reacting to it.
From there, you can decide what actually needs to be addressed and how to move the conversation forward.
Before You Have the Conversation
One of the easiest ways to get pulled off course by a difficult person is to go into the conversation without being clear about what you actually want to accomplish.
We often spend more time anticipating how the person might react than thinking about what needs to be different when the conversation is over.
Before you approach them, get clear about the issue you need to address and what a reasonable outcome would look like.
Maybe you need a decision. You may need them to follow through on something they committed to, stop interrupting during meetings, share information more consistently, or address a disagreement that has been simmering for weeks.
Keep your focus on what you can actually observe and address. You don’t need to prove that someone is controlling, negative, attention-seeking, or avoiding you. You need to be able to talk about what is happening and what needs to change.
That clarity becomes especially important once the conversation starts. Difficult conversations have a way of wandering into old grievances, explanations, blame, and side issues.
Knowing what you came to address makes it much easier to bring the conversation back.
Use RESOLVE™ to Keep the Conversation Moving
Even when you know what you want to address, the actual conversation can still be difficult.
The other person may become defensive, offer excuses, disagree with your version of events, bring up something you did six months ago, or simply shut down. Before long, you can find yourself discussing everything except the reason you started the conversation.
I developed the RESOLVE™ Conversation Playbook to provide some structure for these conversations without turning them into a script.
The RESOLVE™ Conversation Playbook is a 10-step approach I developed to help people address difficult workplace conversations clearly, listen to the other person’s perspective, agree on what needs to happen next, and follow through.
R — Raise the Issue Clearly and Factually
Start with what you have actually seen, heard, or experienced rather than your conclusion about the person.
“You’ve missed the last two deadlines we agreed on” gives you somewhere to go. “You’re unreliable” usually gives you something to argue about.
E — Establish the Goal of the Conversation
Let the person know why you are raising the issue and what you hope the conversation will accomplish.
This can be as simple as, “I’d like us to figure out how we can avoid this happening again.”
Is the goal:
- clarification?
- accountability?
- problem-solving?
- rebuilding trust?
- improving communication?
Having a goal also gives you something to come back to when the conversation starts drifting.
S — Share the Impact
People do not always see how their behaviour affects someone else or the work around them.
Describe how the behaviour is affecting:
- the team
- communication
- productivity
- morale
- trust
- outcomes
Explain the impact without exaggerating it. A missed commitment may have delayed someone else’s work. An interruption may have prevented you from finishing your point. Information that wasn’t shared may have created unnecessary work.
Keep the impact connected to the issue rather than turning it into a list of everything the person has ever done wrong.
O — Open the Conversation and Listen
This is where you find out what you may not know.
Ask for their perspective and listen to the answer. You don’t have to agree with everything they say, but there may be information that changes how you understand the situation.
And sometimes you need to let the silence sit for a moment rather than rushing in to fill it.
L — Look for Collaborative Solutions
Once both perspectives are on the table, move the conversation toward what could be done differently.
What needs to change?
What support may be required?
What actions will help move the situation forward?
Collaboration increases the likelihood of commitment, ownership, and follow-through.
The solution doesn’t always need to be complicated. Sometimes it is a clearer deadline, a different way of communicating, or an agreement about what each person will do next.
V — Verify the Best Path Forward
Before ending the conversation, make sure you are actually agreeing to the same thing.
What will happen next? Who is responsible for what? Is the solution realistic?
A vague “we’ll do better” may feel like agreement in the moment, but it doesn’t give either person much to work with afterwards.
E — Establish Expectations and Consequences
Some situations need greater clarity about what is expected if the problem continues.
This will look different depending on your role. A manager may need to clarify a workplace expectation or consequence. With a colleague, it may mean being clear about what you will do differently if an agreement isn’t honoured.
The point isn’t to threaten. It is to remove ambiguity.
E — Ensure Understanding
Before you leave the conversation, check that both of you understand what was decided.
This is particularly important when the discussion has been tense. People can walk away from the same conversation with surprisingly different interpretations of what was agreed to.
E — Evaluate Progress and Follow Through
A good conversation isn’t much use if nothing changes afterwards.
Pay attention to what happens next. Follow up on commitments and notice whether the behaviour improves or the same pattern starts appearing again.
E — Enforce or Reinforce Consistently
When things improve, acknowledge it.
When they don’t, resist the temptation to keep starting the same conversation from the beginning. Refer back to what was discussed and agreed upon, and decide what needs to happen next.
Consistency matters because difficult patterns often continue when people discover that expectations disappear once the uncomfortable conversation is over.
RESOLVE™ won’t guarantee that the other person will agree with you, change their behaviour, or suddenly become easier to work with.
It does give you a way to stay focused on the issue, hear what needs to be heard, and leave the conversation with greater clarity about what happens next.
What If the Difficult Behaviour Continues?
Sometimes you have the conversation, make a reasonable agreement, and things improve.
Other times, you find yourself having essentially the same conversation again a few weeks later.
This is where the pattern matters more than any single interaction.
Perhaps commitments are repeatedly made and ignored. The person continues blaming others, undermining colleagues, intimidating people, withholding information, or finding new ways around expectations. Feedback may produce a temporary improvement, but before long the old behaviour returns.
At that point, continuing to find better words for the same conversation may not be enough.
If you are a colleague, there may be limits to what you can resolve directly. You can be clear about your boundaries, document agreements that affect your work, and decide when the issue needs to be raised with someone who has the authority to address it.
If you are the person’s leader, repeated behaviour requires a different level of response. The focus shifts from managing a difficult interaction to addressing an ongoing pattern, setting clear expectations, documenting what is happening, and following through when those expectations aren’t met.
This distinction is important because not every difficult person is toxic. People can be defensive, negative, stubborn, avoidant, or simply hard to work with and still respond to a clearer approach.
When the behaviour repeatedly damages trust, interferes with people’s ability to do their work, or continues despite clear conversations and expectations, you may be dealing with something more entrenched.
That is where a more structured leadership response may be needed.
Focus On What You Can Influence
One of the frustrations of dealing with difficult people is that you can do everything reasonably well and still not get the response you hoped for.
You can be clear, listen carefully, adjust your approach, set boundaries, and follow through. The other person may still disagree, become defensive, avoid the issue, or continue behaving in much the same way.
Success isn’t always getting the difficult person to change.
Sometimes it is being able to work with them more effectively. Sometimes it is having a conversation you have been avoiding, setting a boundary that was overdue, or recognizing that you have done what you reasonably can and it is time to involve someone else.
The part you have the most influence over is how you respond.
When you stop trying to find the perfect words that will finally make the other person behave differently, you can put that energy into choosing a response that is clear, appropriate to the situation, and more likely to move things forward.
Final Thoughts on Dealing With Difficult People At Work
After more than 30 years of working with people and organizations, one thing I know for certain is that difficult people aren’t going away.
We will continue to work with people who frustrate us, challenge us, avoid conversations, dominate them, complain, seek recognition, make promises they don’t keep, or simply see the workplace very differently than we do.
What can change is how much we get pulled into those patterns.
Recognize the pattern → Know what you need to accomplish → Adjust your response → Have the RESOLVE™ conversation
You won’t always get it right. There will be conversations you wish you had handled differently and people for whom even your best approach doesn’t seem to make much difference.
But dealing effectively with difficult people isn’t about finding the perfect response or finally getting someone else to behave the way you think they should.
It is about noticing what you are dealing with, being thoughtful about how you respond, and staying focused on what needs to happen next.
Sometimes that improves the relationship. Sometimes it simply makes the working relationship more manageable. And sometimes it helps you recognize that the behaviour has moved beyond something you can—or should—continue trying to handle on your own.
You may not get to choose the difficult people you work with.
You do get more choice in how you deal with them.
Contact Beverly about hosting a workshop for your teams on dealing with difficult people at work. Learn strategies to create a more positive attitude in the workplace and encourage an engaging, safe working environment!
If you have some strategies to share – comment on this posting!
Frequently Asked Questions About Difficult People at Work
What is the best way to deal with a difficult person at work?
Start by looking for the pattern in their behaviour rather than simply reacting to the latest difficult interaction. Consider what you need to accomplish, adjust your approach to the behaviour you are dealing with, and then address the issue clearly. The same approach will not work equally well with someone who is manipulative, avoiding conflict, constantly complaining, or eager to please.
How do you deal with a difficult coworker you have to work with every day?
Focus on the behaviours that are interfering with the work rather than trying to change the person’s personality. Be clear about what you need from the working relationship, address problems when they arise, and establish reasonable boundaries around what you will and will not accept. When a conversation is needed, the RESOLVE™ Conversation Playbook can help you keep it focused on the issue and what needs to happen next.
What is the difference between difficult person and toxic person at work?
Someone can be frustrating, negative, defensive, stubborn, avoidant, or hard to work with without necessarily being toxic. The concern increases when harmful behaviour becomes a repeated pattern that damages trust, interferes with people’s ability to do their work, or continues despite clear conversations and expectations. Persistent patterns generally require a different response than an occasional difficult interaction.
How do you talk to a difficult person without making the situation worse?
Go into the conversation knowing what you want to accomplish. Raise the issue using specific examples rather than labels or assumptions about the person, explain the impact, and give them an opportunity to share their perspective. Listen to what they have to say without losing sight of the issue you came to discuss.
What should I do if a difficult coworker won’t change?
There are limits to how much influence you have over another person’s behaviour. If you have addressed the issue clearly and the same pattern continues, focus on what you can control: your response, your boundaries, and how you protect your ability to do your work. If the behaviour is interfering with your work or affecting others, it may be time to involve your manager or another appropriate person in your organization.
When should I involve my manager or HR about a difficult coworker?
Not every frustrating interaction needs to be escalated. Consider involving your manager or the appropriate workplace resource when the behaviour is ongoing, your attempts to address it have not worked, it is interfering with your ability to do your job, or the situation is beyond what you have the authority to resolve yourself. Serious workplace concerns should be handled through the appropriate organizational processes rather than trying to manage them alone.
Additional Postings:
7 Reality Anchors™ for Dealing With Difficult People
When Fear Replaces Respect: Addressing Intimidation and Bullying in the Workplace
5 Strategies to Avoid Being a Micromanaging Leader
What is the S-O-S Resilience Principle
Navigating Toxicity: A Guide for Leaders in Handling Difficult Conversations
Stop Letting That Difficult Person Ruin Your Day
How To Handle A Difficult Boss
Management Practices That Can Lead To A Toxic Workplace
Difficult People: The Emotional Contagion
Don’t Let That Difficult Customers Rattle Your Staff
How to Build a Positive Workplace Culture | C.U.L.T.I.V.A.T.E. the Culture™
What Is Adaptability Quotient (AQ)? A Leadership System for Navigating Change
Effective Communication For Leadership Success
What Is the S-O-S Resilience Principle ™ – A Practical System for Managing Stress in Real Time