13

One of my favorite questions to ask people who are dealing with a difficult colleague is: “What would you do about this situation if you could do anything you wanted?”

I suggest they put aside financial considerations, societal norms, and any repercussions. The answers range from practical to entertaining to a bit scary (there are lots of people who want to punch an annoying colleague in the face!). Many fantasize about quitting dramatically. Others just want to tell their coworker exactly how they feel without mincing words. God knows I’ve come up with some nasty comebacks in my head while walking my dog.

There are two reasons I ask this question. First, I want people to think expansively about how they might respond, and often, without constraints, they land on a strategy that might actually work (not punching someone in the face).

Second, this can be a useful exercise for venting frustration. I remember driving in the car with my mother several years ago when I noticed she was looking at and moving her hand in a strange way, as if she was in pain. I asked her what was happening. At the time, she was a lobbyist in the Connecticut State General Assembly, representing over thirty nonprofit organizations. Her days were filled with challenging conversations, and she had endless stories about fellow lobbyists, clients, and legislators who fit many of the archetypes in this book. In response to my question, she held up her hand, laughed, and told me: “This is a legislator.” She explained that she and her hand-legislator were engaged in a screaming match that she knew they could never have in person. It was her way of letting off steam.

I’ll talk a bit more about positive coping mechanisms like this one in chapter 14, but first, I want to look at the less productive approaches that we sometimes gravitate toward, even when we know they won’t work or may backfire. Avoiding this short list of tactics will prevent you from making things worse. They may alleviate your pain in the short term but are ultimately bad for you, the other person, and your organization.

Suppressing Your Emotions

When you’re at your wits’ end with a challenging colleague, and it feels like you’ve tried everything, well-meaning friends and coworkers may tell you to “just ignore it” or to “suck it up” and move on with your life. This can be good advice if you’re truly able to let it go. But often we decide we’re going to do nothing but actually end up doing a whole lot of things, whether it’s stewing about the situation, talking our partner’s ear off about it, or becoming passive-aggressive. Suppressing our emotions rarely helps.

Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, writes that “suppressing your emotions—deciding not to say something when you’re upset—can lead to bad results.”1 She explains that if you don’t express your feelings, they’re likely to show up in unexpected places.

Psychologists call this emotional leakage. “Have you ever yelled at your spouse or child after a frustrating day at work—a frustration that had nothing to do with him or her? When you bottle up your feelings, you’re likely to express your emotions in unintended ways instead, either sarcastically or in a completely different context. Suppressing your emotions is associated with poor memory, difficulties in relationships, and physiological costs (such as cardiovascular health problems),” David explains.2 In other words, sucking it up doesn’t usually decrease your stress level. It raises it.

The risk that you’ll take out your negative feelings on innocent bystanders isn’t the only reason to avoid this tactic. Caroline Webb, author of How to Have a Good Day, points out that, while the intention behind pretending you’re not upset with a difficult colleague may be good—perhaps you want to preserve the relationship—they are likely to sense your irritation anyway. “Because of emotional contagion, they might not be conscious that you harbor negativity toward them, but it will still have an effect on them. Your passive-aggressiveness is going to come through, even in remote work environments,” she told me.3 Research has shown that it’s not just you who suffers the physical impact of suppression either. If you hide anger or frustration, the blood pressure of those around you is likely to rise as well.4 They may not know exactly what you’re feeling and thinking, but they register underlying tension just the same.

Retaliating

Another tempting response to mistreatment is to fight fire with fire. If your passive-aggressive teammate says one thing in a meeting and does something completely different afterward, why not do the same to them? Or if your pessimistic colleague is going to poke a zillion holes in your ideas, why shouldn’t you take them down when they suggest something new? Unfortunately, stooping to their level doesn’t generally work. You intensify the feeling of being on opposing sides rather than giving the dynamic a chance to change. And retaliation often makes you look bad. Or worse, it violates your values.

To avoid giving in to the (understandable) desire for revenge, commit to behaving in line with your values. Sometimes it’s helpful to write them down. What is it that you care about? What matters most to you? If you’re not sure, consider looking at a set of universal values, such as those created by social psychologist Shalom Schwartz and his colleagues, and see which resonate with you, listing them in order of importance (see table 13-1). Then, when you’re coming up with a plan for how you want to respond to your insecure boss or biased coworker, refer to the list and make sure that the tactics you land on align with your values.

TABLE 13-1

Universal values

Source: Adapted from Shalom H. Schwartz, “An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values,” Online Readings in Psychology and Culture 2, no. 1 (December 2012), https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116.

Shaming

When I’m dealing with someone who fits one of the eight archetypes, I often fantasize about sending an email to everyone who knows them, outing them as a jerk. My (flawed) logic is that if the person who has wronged me is humiliated enough, they will be forced to change their ways.

Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule, sums up why this doesn’t work: “Calling people an asshole is one of the most reliable ways to turn someone into an asshole—or make them hate you.”5 That’s because feelings of shame rarely inspire us to behave better; more often, they make us lash out further.

I like the way that Brené Brown distinguishes between shame and guilt and explains their relative usefulness:

Making your colleague feel as if they’re a bad person, labeling them as a racist, a jerk, or someone who plays the victim, is unlikely to improve your relationship.

Similarly, dehumanizing a difficult coworker doesn’t help. It’s easy to demonize the person who causes us harm, but hating them only pits you against one another. Instead, make sure that every step of the way, you remind yourself that you’re dealing with a fellow human, not a robot or an arch villain. As Webb told me, “Seeing them as a human being with frailties—just like you—can be a powerful first step in defusing tension.”7

Hoping Your Colleague Will Leave

Many of us bank on outlasting our difficult colleagues and focus on making the situation workable until they get fired or move on to another job. But be careful of putting all of your eggs in the eventually they’ll be gone” basket. Sutton warns that sometimes “removing the bad apples” does little to change the underlying issue, especially if your colleague’s obnoxious behavior is validated by the organizational culture. Often other things need to change to prevent incivility, he says, things like the “incentive system, who’s promoted and rewarded, how meetings are run, and the pressure people are under to perform.”

A few years ago, the head of HR for a health insurance company asked me to train its staff on how to have difficult conversations. She explained that the company had a very hierarchical culture and was having trouble getting people to speak up, especially with ideas that challenged the status quo. Nine years earlier, it had done a survey that showed employees felt it was a very “command and control” environment. Determined to evolve, executives led several culture change initiatives and hired new leaders who were known for having a more collaborative and less autocratic style. Those leaders also replaced people on their teams so that within that nine-year period, almost 80 percent of the employee population had turned over, including most of the leadership team. But when they conducted the culture survey again, they got almost exactly the same results. The exasperated HR executive told me, “It’s like it’s in the water here.”

Sometimes it’s not individual people who are the problem but the systems that allow, and in some cases encourage, hostility over cooperation. And systems are hard to change. Your dream that your difficult coworker will walk out the door may come true, but there’s no guarantee that the culture will shift or that you’ll get along with their replacement. Ultimately you’re better off trying to create a workable situation with your colleague now than hoping things will improve if they leave.

• • •

Will you always be able to avoid these flawed responses? No. Nobody’s perfect. But if you catch yourself trying to put on a brave face, take down your challenging coworker, or wait for someone else to get rid of them for you, take a deep breath and go back to the strategies outlined for the specific archetype you’re dealing with or return to the nine principles outlined in chapter 11 and try to set things straight.

Unproductive approaches are seductive. But if you get a flat tire, you don’t fix the problem by slashing the other three tires. When you strike out with the first tactic (or several tactics) you choose, try something else—or reach out for help. Maybe your boss, a friend, or a mutual colleague can offer a novel solution. The point is to keep at it; remember, even small improvements can make a big difference.