Difficult personalities

How to Deal with Other’s Incompetence – 5 Tips

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work incompetence

I work on multiple initiatives simultaneously at my current job.  Some of them are long term, big projects, and some of them are smaller projects under one big program.  Two of these smaller projects have given me serious headaches and stress in the past few days.

Why?  Because the key people I work with on these two projects: ...  read more

Don’t Care Too Much at Work

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It may sound counter-intuitive for me to recommend that you shouldn’t care too much at work.  However, after reading this story, hopefully you can understand and appreciate why you should not care too much, if you want to accelerate your career success.

On Monday, I had a morning phone meeting with one of the data team leaders who was doing some reporting for our enterprise level initiative.  I was not looking forward to it, as the lead person is one of those less-than-competent folks I mentioned in my recent article, How to Deal with Others’ Incompetence.
 ...  read more

Dealing with Difficult Personalities – What Not to Do

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difficult-personalities

How should we deal with difficult personalities?  I have been thinking about how to write about this topic for three weeks now.  I realized it’s hard, because there are so many potential dimensions and scenarios to this question:

  1. Who is this person that you consider “difficult” – a senior executive, boss, peer, colleague, customer, vendor, or support staff?
  2. What is your definition of “difficult” – does this person appear elusive, rude, incompetent, belligerent, passive aggressive, unreliable, back-stabbing, etc..?
  3. What do you need to accomplish with this person, but it’s been “difficult” – are you trying to get information, delegate work, reach a common goal, get a buy-in, etc…?
  4. What could you accomplish if this person stopped being “difficult” – would you get more done, have less stress, feel happier at work, etc.?
  5. What are the risks to your job if this person continues to be “difficult” towards you – tense work environment, slow work progress, cannot work around them, etc?
  6. Does this person seem “difficult” to everyone, or just you?

I decided to use one of my past experiences with a “difficult personality” to illustrate how we can deal with these types of situations.  At my last job, I had to work well with a lot of cross functional colleagues in order to get information and achieve results.  I remember the first meeting I had with a new colleague (let’s call her Anna).  Anna is a data team lead who provided invaluable data analysis for my projects.  She had a great reputation for being smart and excellent at her job.  I also met her casually in the hallway, and thought she was quite nice. ...  read more

Dealing with Difficult Personalities – 5 Effective Tips

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difficult personality

In my article, “Dealing with Difficult Personalities – What Not to Do,” I talked about 4 things not to do:

  1. Don’t react emotionally or defensively.
  2. Don’t try to change this person.
  3. Don’t complain to this person’s boss to try to resolve this.
  4. Don’t gossip about this situation with other co-workers.

Continuing with my example with Anna, what should I have done?  To recap: Anna hada great reputation for being smart and excellent at her job.   I also met her casually in the hallway, and thought she was quite nice.  During our first business meeting, she cut me off and began to pepper me with questions about why I needed this data and what I planned to use it for.  Her tone was sharp and aggressive.  I was quite surprised and caught off guard. ”  Here are 5 tips I recommend using to deal with any “difficult personality” at work, and for achieving the best long-term results. ...  read more