11

I’ve made my fair share of mistakes when it comes to getting along with coworkers. I’ve hurled passive-aggressive digs in the heat of the moment. I’ve sent unkind emails that I wish I could take back. I’ve rolled my eyes at someone who I thought was being unreasonable. I’ve smiled to a colleague’s face while thinking, “I hate you; I can’t believe I have to do this. I wish you’d quit.” And, yes, I’ve talked behind coworkers’ backs when my attempts to make things better weren’t reciprocated.

None of us is perfect when it comes to navigating the complexity of human relationships. But I’ve learned that there are certain touchpoints—key concepts to help you clean up your side of the street—that I return to over and over, whether I’m dealing with someone who fits neatly into one of the eight archetypes or who defies categorization.

The following principles should sound familiar—they’re interwoven in the previous chapters. I draw them out and expand on them here because, together, they form the basis of how I think about interpersonal resilience. I hope these principles will strengthen your resolve and boost your effectiveness in the face of conflict, no matter who you’re at odds with.

I recommend reading this chapter before you begin to plot out the steps you’ll take with your difficult coworker. For example, if you’re struggling with a passive-aggressive peer, you’ll make a plan using the tactics outlined in chapter 6. But before you take action, consider the advice here as well. (Once you’re familiar with the nine principles, use table 11-1 at the end of this chapter as a quick reference to test the soundness of your strategy.)

As we learned in chapter 2, our brains often work against us in moments when we’re struggling with a colleague. In times of stress—when we feel threatened—even the workplace veterans among us are motivated by short-term goals: I need to look good in front of my team. Get me out of this conversation! I have to win. I want everyone to like me. And it’s easy to lose sight of how we know we should behave.

Returning to these principles in those moments—and thoughtfully and carefully preparing yourself to navigate rough interpersonal seas—will help you reach the long-term goal of getting along.

The Principles

Principle 1: Focus on what you can control

Paola was struggling to get through to one of her direct reports, Franco, who she found incredibly stubborn. He refused to accept that anyone else on the team had expertise or insight that could be helpful to him in his technical role (a classic know-it-all). Paola had pointed out the behaviors that were bothering Franco’s teammates and hurting his performance, including using a condescending tone and interrupting others, and asked him to stop. But he didn’t—it seemed her feedback fell on deaf ears.

If there was an easy way to convince an aggravating coworker to change their ways, this would’ve been a very short book. The reality is that few people alter their behavior because someone else wants them to. They do it if and when they want to.

I’ve been in many situations where I thought, If I can just explain this to the other person, surely they’ll understand. We’ve all fantasized about saying or doing the perfect thing that forces a rival to see the light, to realize the error of their ways and vow to completely reform. But, Wharton professor Adam Grant, author of Think Again, says that sharing our logic doesn’t always work. He writes: “I no longer believe it’s my place to change anyone’s mind. All I can do is try to understand their thinking and ask if they’re open to some rethinking. The rest is up to them.”1 Hear, hear!

Even as Franco’s boss, Paola didn’t have the power to make him change. Instead, she focused on what she could do differently. She decided to give Franco more-frequent feedback, dedicating five minutes of their weekly one-on-one meetings to pointing out how his behavior impacted the team and his effectiveness. Then, she simply had to hope that this adjustment in her approach would motivate him to alter his attitude. He eventually toned down his arrogance some, and Paola felt better knowing that she was doing the right thing even if he didn’t budge as much as she’d hoped.

To be honest, I don’t fully agree with the oft-given advice: “You can’t change another person.” I’ve seen many professionals who successfully persuaded a passive-aggressive peer to be more direct or convinced a colleague who played the victim to take responsibility for their failures. But if getting along with your colleague entirely depends on your ability to convince them to become a different person, you’re taking a big risk. They may not have the capacity to change, or they might not want to. The only control you really have is over yourself.

Principle 2: Your perspective is just one perspective

Several years ago, I was working with a colleague who I’ll call Cara. We were butting heads over how long we thought a project would take. When asked for our estimates, I was shocked that she expected it to take four times as long as I had assumed. But instead of thinking, “Wow, we’re seeing this completely differently,” I thought, “She’s out of her mind!” I went into our conversations convinced there was no way she was even close to correct. And it became clear that she felt the same about me. Our judgment about each other’s perspective was obvious, and things got tense.

We were facing one of the realities of difficult conversations: there’s rarely an objective truth. We all come to the workplace with different perspectives and sets of values. We disagree on everything from whether it’s OK to be five minutes late to a meeting, to whether interrupting someone who’s going on and on is justifiable, to the appropriate consequences for making a mistake. It’s not realistic to think you’ll work with people who see eye to eye with you all the time.

There’s a concept from social psychology called naive realism that explains just how different our perspectives can be. Naive realism is the tendency to believe that we’re seeing the world around us objectively, and if someone doesn’t see it the same way, they’re uninformed, irrational, or biased.2 One study in this area looked at what happened when participants were asked to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and listeners tried to guess the song. Those doing the tapping thought that the listeners would guess the tune around 50 percent of the time, which was a huge overestimation given that they only guessed right 2.5 percent of the time.3 Once we know something, like the tune of a song or the perfect solution to this quarter’s budget shortfall, we find it hard to imagine that others won’t recognize it too.

Naive realism is connected to another relevant cognitive bias: fundamental attribution error. This is the inclination to observe another person’s behavior and assume it has more to do with their personality than it does with the situation in which they find themselves. So if your colleague is late to a meeting, you might presume it’s because they’re disorganized or disrespectful, not because they were caught in traffic or in another meeting that ran over. But we do the opposite when it comes to ourselves. When you’re running behind, you probably focus on all the circumstances that led to your tardiness, not the idea that you’re fatally flawed.

It’s important to remember these two concepts in your dealings with your coworker. You’re likely making assumptions that aren’t necessarily true. The divide between your perspective and theirs can feel insurmountable, especially if you insist on a single view of what’s happened and who’s to blame. You can spend hours debating whose interpretation is correct, but reaching agreement on the “facts” is very unlikely. Instead of rehashing the past—a tactic that usually leads to nothing but hard feelings and deadlock—try to focus on what should happen going forward.

You don’t have to agree to get along. You only have to respect each other’s perspective enough to decide on a way forward. Rather than convincing Cara that she was completely off base (which I tried), I acknowledged that her perspective—informed by her own experience—was equally valid. In the course of our conversations, she made several points that shifted my thinking. And because I demonstrated a willingness to change my mind, she did the same. We came to a compromise—a schedule that she felt was a bit ambitious and I thought was slightly padded, but we could both live with. What we needed was a path forward, not a shared worldview.

To avoid wasting energy trying to convince my colleagues to see things my way or obsessing over being right or what the “truth” is, I now spend time challenging my own perspective:

• What if I’m wrong? How would I act differently?
• How do I know that what I believe is true? What assumptions have I made?
• How would someone with different values and experiences see things differently?

The answers to the questions matter less than the exercise of asking them. They are an important way of reminding myself that my view is just that: my view. Others see things differently—and that’s OK.

Principle 3: Be aware of your biases

Interactions with our coworkers are not only influenced by our values and experiences, but also by our biases. Even our definition of “difficult” behavior can be shaped by the prejudices that we carry into the workplace.

I’ll share an example I’m not particularly proud of. When I was working as a consultant, I had a client, a Black woman, who I was hesitant to push back on because I worried she would get angry. One of her direct reports—a white woman—stopped me in the hallway of their offices one day and mentioned that I seemed to be holding back with her boss. She was kind and seemed genuinely curious about why I was acting differently than I had in past meetings. I can’t recall exactly what I said, but it was something about wanting to keep the client happy. I do remember her response clearly: “She’s not going to bite your head off.”

When forced to reflect, I realized that I’d seen my client’s direct reports challenge her multiple times and she took it well. Sure, she spoke her mind and wasn’t afraid to ask tough questions, but I’d never seen her irate. I was allowing stereotypes—specifically the “angry Black woman” trope—to influence my behavior. Not only was I doing her a disservice by typecasting her, I was also failing to do my job as a consultant, which was to present new ideas and challenge the status quo, because of some imagined backlash.

Ultimately, my hesitation to speak up wasn’t about the client at all. It was about me and my prejudices.

The tricky thing about biases is that we’re often unaware of them. As I discussed in chapter 2, our brains are wired to conserve resources, so they take shortcuts, rapidly putting people and things into categories, and assigning attributes to those categories informed by societal, sociological, and historical constructs of race, gender, sexual orientation, or class. Certain groups are labeled as easygoing, others as smart, still others as threatening.

There are two specific types of bias that are particularly helpful to understand when it comes to navigating difficult relationships: affinity bias and confirmation bias.

Affinity bias is the unconscious tendency to get along with people who are like us. In other words, we gravitate toward people with similar appearances, beliefs, and backgrounds. When colleagues aren’t like us—perhaps in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, education, physical abilities, position at work—we are less likely to want to work with them. That’s why it’s critical when we’re struggling with a coworker to ask ourselves: “What role could bias be playing here? Is it possible I’m not seeing the situation clearly because we’re different in certain ways?”

Another form of prejudice that often seeps into workplace relationships is confirmation bias. This is the tendency to interpret events or evidence as confirmation of existing beliefs, and it plays out with vexing coworkers in two ways. First, if your view of a colleague is negative, you are more likely to interpret their actions as further evidence of your belief about them—they’re not up to the task, they’re unkind, or they only care about themselves. Second, if you’ve started to believe that your coworker falls into one of the eight archetypes—or a different category altogether—it will be increasingly difficult for that person to prove you wrong. You are preprogrammed to see “jerk-like” behavior from someone who you already think is a jerk.

So how do you interrupt these biases? There are a few things you can do:

• Get to know your biases. Taking a quiz online to get a better sense of your susceptibility to hidden biases is a good place to start. There are tons to choose from. I like the one from Project Implicit, a nonprofit started by researchers at Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia.
• Explore different perspectives. There are lots of exercises you can do to help elucidate implicit assumptions. Listen to podcasts or read articles and books written by people who aren’t like you. Learn about different cultures by doing your own research or attending educational events in your area. Practices like this will also help you understand your privilege, or the ways that you experience advantage as a result of your gender, race, sexuality, religion, and so on.
• Ask for help. When you face a conflict with a coworker, consult someone you trust—someone who is willing to push back on you—to reflect on the ways that you might be seeing the situation unfairly. You could even be explicit and ask: “What role might my biases be playing here?”
• Question your interpretation. Play devil’s advocate with yourself, repeatedly asking whether you are seeing a contentious situation impartially. Use the “flip it to test it” approach I talked about in chapters 7 and 8: if your colleague were a different gender, race, sexual orientation, would you make the same assumptions? Or be willing to say the same things or treat them the same way?

I used this last tactic when I examined my reaction to my client. Would I assume she was going to be “angry” if she was a white woman, or a white man, or even a Black man? The answer was clear: no. If the client were a man, I might’ve interpreted the same behavior as “passionate” or “committed” or maybe “curt” at worst. But anger wouldn’t have come to mind. This was an important exercise for me to recognize my own flawed logic and to move beyond it. That’s not to say my biases went away. But I was able to monitor them more carefully.

Principle 4: Don’t make it “me against them”

In a disagreement, it’s easy to think in terms of two separate parties, even enemies at war. Lots of advice about navigating a dispute uses the word counterpart, which implies that there is someone opposed to or working against you. I used this wording in my last book about conflict, but I’ve come to think of this frame of mind as detrimental.

If it’s “me against you,” the situation becomes polarizing. There’s someone who’s being difficult and someone who isn’t, someone who is right and someone who is wrong. As I explained in chapter 2, this type of storytelling is part of our brain’s natural response to negative emotions like anger, fear, pain, or defensiveness. The narrative of “victim versus villain” can be comforting, but it’s rare that we are blameless.

To get along with your colleague, you need a different mental model. Instead of seeing two opposing factions, imagine that there are three entities in the situation: you, your colleague, and the dynamic between you. Maybe that third entity is something specific: a decision you have to make together or a project plan you need to complete. Or maybe it’s more general: ongoing tension between you or bad blood because of a project gone wrong. Either way, this approach separates the people from the problem, which is advice you might’ve heard before; it’s one of the Harvard Negotiation Project’s core principles for handling difficult conversations.4

Andre struggled with his pessimistic colleague, Emilia. He felt like whenever he proposed a new idea, Emilia had a list of reasons why it could never work. For a long time, Andre told me, he saw the two of them as opponents and pictured a dark cloud over her head and a bright sun over him. This visualization reinforced his view of things, but it didn’t help him get along with Emilia, especially since he went into every conversation bracing himself for a battle. So he tried to change the image, picturing the dynamic between them as a seesaw that each person was choosing to get on and balance out whenever they were at odds. This helped shift his attitude. He stopped seeing Emilia as an adversary and thought of her as a collaborator instead.

Consider choosing your own image to represent the troubling dynamic between you and your coworker. For example, you might visualize yourself and the other person on the same side of a table, working on a problem—your unhealthy relationship—together. No one wants a nemesis at work. So put that idea away and think about how to engage your colleague in problem-solving, which is inherently collaborative instead of combative.

Principle 5: Rely on empathy to see things differently

“Try to see it from their perspective” is advice you’ve probably heard before. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to do when I’m dealing with an insecure boss or an overly political peer is to think about their feelings. When people are passive-aggressive, conniving, or mean, why should I care how they feel?

For starters, we often perceive slights to be worse than they were intended to be. This is what Gabrielle Adams, a professor at the University of Virginia, found in her research. People who feel like they’ve been wronged by a coworker overestimate how much the wrongdoer intended to harm them.5 As Adams explained to me, “We imbue others’ actions with a lot more intent than is usually there.”6

This goes both ways. In another study, Adams found that both the “transgressor” and the “victim” are liable to assume the worst about one another. As she summarizes, we all “make erroneous attributions about each other’s intent to do harm, how much harm was caused, how severe the issue is, how guilty the other person feels, etc.”7 Telling yourself that your politics-playing colleague meant to take credit for your work (and is therefore undeserving of your empathy) is not only potentially unfair to your colleague, but it nudges you toward wallowing, revenge, or other unproductive responses rather than getting along.

It’s far better to give your coworker the benefit of the doubt. Assume there is some rationale behind their prickly behavior (even if you don’t agree with it). What might they be thinking? What are they trying to achieve? What pressures are they under? What else do they have going on—at work or at home? Seeking compassionate explanations for hurtful actions (even if they’re not 100 percent true) will give you the space—having deescalated feelings of threat—to respond thoughtfully.

This is a lesson I learn over and over from my daughter. When she was nine, we were driving on the highway not far from our house. As we slowed down because of traffic ahead, two motorcyclists came whizzing by in between lanes. They were easily going ninety miles per hour, maybe even a hundred, and neither one was wearing a helmet. Thinking this was a teachable moment for my daughter, I started to lay into the motorcyclists: “I can’t believe how fast they’re going, and without helmets! That’s so dangerous.” My daughter joined in, also acting incensed. “They should know better, they’re adults!” I smiled, feeling content that she had learned something about safety. After a few moments of silence, she said, “Mommy, maybe they’re on the way to buy helmets.”

Now, I’m 99 percent certain those motorcyclists were not on their way to buy helmets, but her comment was a perfect reminder to try to see a tense situation from the other person’s perspective, with a generous spirit. And, true or not, her observation softened the conversation and our stance toward those humans on their motorcycles.

One word of caution: seeing a hostile situation from your coworker’s perspective does require mental resources, so be careful that you don’t get so focused on walking a mile in someone else’s shoes that you forget to consider your own needs. Start by giving yourself a dose of self-compassion for what you’re going through before you turn your attention to your colleague. (For more on the importance of self-care in the midst of conflict, see chapter 14.)

Principle 6: Know your goal

Whenever you’re trying to address an unhealthy dynamic between you and a coworker, it’s important to be clear with yourself about what you want. Identifying your goal will help you avoid getting pulled into any drama and stay focused on constructive tactics.

Do you want to move a stalled project forward? Complete the initiative you’ve been working on together and move on? Have a healthy working relationship that will last into the future? Feel less angry or frustrated after interacting with them? Or do you want your colleague to stop undermining your success?

I recommend making a list of the goals you’d like to achieve (big and small) and then circling the one, two, or three that are most important. Your intentions will determine—subconsciously and consciously—how you act. For instance, if your goal is to avoid getting stuck in long discussions with your pessimistic colleague, you’ll make different decisions than if your goal is to help them become aware of how their naysaying is bringing down the team.

It’s all right to set your sights low. Often it’s enough to focus on just having a functional relationship. It would be a big win if you can get to the point where your skin doesn’t crawl when their name shows up in your inbox, or you’re not losing sleep at night because they’re on your mind. A minimal goal like, “Don’t think about this person while I’m having dinner with my family,” is absolutely fine.

You may have multiple goals. For example, if you’re fighting with your insecure boss about which metrics to report to the senior leadership team and he’s sent you some heated emails that challenge your experience with web analytics, your goals might be to: (1) come up with a set of stats that you can both live with, and (2) make sure that the senior leadership team knows about your expertise. You might also set a goal of having less heated exchanges right before important meetings.

Don’t let your hidden agendas throw you off course. For example, in dealing with your overly political colleague, you may say that your goal is to stop worrying that they’re going to undermine you. But what you really want is for them to pay: to be fired, or to feel as miserable as they’ve made you feel, or to be recognized by everyone in the organization as the dishonest manipulator they are. Ulterior motives often color your interactions, causing you to use language or a tone that is excessively critical or condescending, compromising your ability to achieve your stated goal. It’s important to be aware of your secret (or not-so-secret) motivations, so say them out loud or document them, along with your other objectives. Then try to put all ill intentions (no matter how justifiable they seem) aside.

When you’ve decided on your goals, write them down on a piece of paper. Research has shown that people who vividly describe or picture their goals are anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to accomplish them, and you are more likely to achieve objectives that you record by hand.8 Refer to your goals before any interaction with your colleague so you can stay focused on your destination.

Principle 7: Avoid gossip, mostly

“Is it me, or is Greta being particularly grumpy this week?”

There are lots of reasons we turn to others when something is off at work. It might be to confirm that you’re not misinterpreting a vague email. It could be to determine whose buy-in you need to push forward that stalled cross-department initiative. Or maybe you’re seeking reassurance. And when your colleague says, “Yes, Greta does seem grumpy. What’s up with that?” you get a little jolt of relief: It’s not just me.

This type of side conversation, whether it happens digitally or in person, can be particularly complicated when it comes to dealing with difficult colleagues. And let’s call it what it is: gossip.

In chapter 10, I talked about how to handle your careerist colleague’s gossiping, and I pointed out that there are upsides to being tapped into the rumor mill. Workplace gossip can play an important role in bonding with coworkers and information sharing. When you find out that Marina also finds Michael from finance difficult to work with, it fosters a sense of connection. If you learn that it’s not just the two of you who wish Michael would be more of a team player (or find another job), that bond becomes even deeper. You have essentially formed an in-group which has information that others, especially Michael, don’t have. Your perspective has also been validated, so you get the rush of adrenaline and dopamine that comes from feeling like you’re “right.”

Here’s a secret about gossip: studies have shown that it can actually deter people from behaving selfishly. If a team member knows that others might talk badly about them if they’re uncooperative or rude, it can prevent them from misbehaving in the first place.9 I would argue that talking to someone directly about what they’re doing and who it’s hurting is a better approach, but research has indeed shown that gossiping about people indirectly punishes them and warns others about the pitfalls of working with them.10

Does that mean you should talk behind your coworkers’ backs? Well, not so fast. There are dangers as well. First, it could make you more susceptible to confirmation bias. Sure, Michael may be exasperating sometimes, but once you and your work friends start talking about it, you’re more likely to interpret his future actions as negative. Occasional missteps start to get painted as an inherent trait and the “Michael is difficult” storyline becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When others are invested in a particular story about a colleague, it’s exponentially harder to change the narrative. Additionally, gossiping often reflects poorly on the gossiper. You may get the immediate validation you’re seeking, but you may also garner a reputation for being unprofessional—or end up labeled as the difficult one.

Before you start spreading rumors about how incompetent your boss is or how unbearable it is to work with the tormentor who heads up your department, think about your goal. Whether it’s to improve your relationship, feel better, or get your job done despite resistance, ask yourself whether gossip will help or hurt the situation.

It is perfectly legitimate to seek help sorting out your feelings or to check that you are seeing things clearly with someone else. But choose who you talk to (and what you share) carefully—seek out people who are constructive, have your best interests at heart, will challenge your perspective when they disagree, and exercise discretion.

Principle 8: Experiment to find what works

There isn’t one right answer or proven path that you can follow to get your know-it-all colleague to stop being condescending or your passive-aggressive peer to deal with you in a more straightforward way. In this book, I’ve shared strategies that have been shown to work, but which ones you try and how you apply them will depend on the context: who you are, who the other person is, the nature of your relationship, the norms and culture of your workplace, and so on.

Improving a relationship can be overwhelming; it’s no easy feat. But it will feel far more manageable if you start by coming up with two or three ideas you want to test out. Often, small actions can have a big impact. Design an experiment: determine what you’ll do differently, set a time period during which you’ll try your approach, and see how it works. For example, if you want to improve communication with a passive-aggressive colleague, you might decide that for two weeks, you’re going to ignore their tone and focus on the underlying message. Rather than assuming that’s going to fix everything between you, see it as a test and acknowledge that you’ll likely learn something, even if you learn that the tactic doesn’t work. Then, set up another experiment, tweaking your approach over time.

Keep refreshing the approaches you try and be willing to abandon ones that aren’t producing results. If you’ve attempted to handle a colleague’s lack of follow-through by sending an email after meetings confirming what everyone has agreed to do, and this hasn’t prevented your colleague from saying one thing in meetings and doing something else later on, then don’t repeat the experiment expecting different results. A situation like that calls for what conflict expert Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler calls a “constructive, pattern-breaking action,” which is a simple act “designed to interrupt the conflict pattern of the past.”11 In other words, try something you haven’t tried before, even something the other person might not expect.

Principle 9: Be—and stay—curious

When it comes to confronting a negative dynamic with a coworker, it’s easy to tell yourself, “This is the way it’s always going to be” or “Why should I expect them to change?” or “We just don’t get along.” I won’t tell you that it’s going to be fun or even pleasant to do what you need to do to salvage a troubled relationship, but complacency and pessimism will get you nowhere. Instead, adopt a curious mindset.

Research shows there are a lot of benefits to being curious at work—benefits that will make navigating conflict easier. For example, curiosity has been shown to help us avoid falling into confirmation bias and prevent us from stereotyping people. It also helps us stay out of amygdala hijack, as we’re more likely to approach tough situations creatively and be less defensive and aggressive.12

Adopting a curious mindset also helps to disrupt the stories we tell ourselves, especially if we can switch from drawing unflattering conclusions to posing genuine questions. When your colleague Isabel starts to pick apart another coworker’s proposal, for example, rather than telling yourself, Here we go again with Isabel’s naysaying. Doesn’t she know how to do anything else? you might ask, What’s going on with her? This feels familiar, but what have I missed in the past? Why is she acting like this?

Assume you have something to learn and believe that the negative dynamic can turn around, both of which are aspects of adopting a growth mindset. Of course, it’s not always easy to get—or stay—in that frame of mind when you’re feeling frustrated. Try to catch yourself in an unproductive thought pattern, step back, and change the framing. Instead of thinking, Isabel is … , try One view of Isabel is that she can be quite negative. What are some other options? Think about the other people she works with. Is there someone who genuinely enjoys working with her? Try to put yourself in that colleague’s shoes. Look for disconfirming evidence or instances when Isabel does the opposite of what you expect—taking a positive or neutral stance, for example.

Another way to foster a growth mindset is to remind yourself of times when you or others have changed. Think of previous instances, at work or elsewhere, where you and another person didn’t get along at first or hit a rough patch but were able to get past it. Rely on these previous experiences to challenge any preconceived notions about people’s immutability. How were you able to persevere? What helped you achieve resolution?

Focus, too, on what you stand to gain from meeting your goals for your relationship. Project into the future. If you achieve your objectives, what will be different? How will your work life improve? Consider posting the intentions that you wrote down earlier in this chapter somewhere you can see them as a reminder of what success will feel and look like. Not only will you have solved your current predicament, but you’ll have improved your ability to navigate other tricky relationships you encounter at work.

• • •

Resolving conflict can be a bumpy ride, and some of your experiments will fail miserably. You might even feel like things are getting worse. But don’t lose hope—change is possible, and the dynamic is not set in stone. As the famed Argentinian therapist Salvador Minuchin said: “Certainty is the enemy of change.”13 You can’t be certain of what the future holds for you and your colleague, so be curious instead. It’ll snap you out of the fixed mindset that might be keeping you from discovering an unexpected solution to your problem.

No matter what type of difficult colleague you’re dealing with or what you decide to do next, keeping these nine principles top of mind will improve your odds of building stronger, more fulfilling relationships at work.

Summary of the Nine Principles

Once you’re ready to take steps to better get along with your difficult colleague, you can use table 11-1 to double-check that you’re going in with the right mindset and that you’ve selected tactics that will set you up for success.

TABLE 11-1

Nine principles for getting along with anyone