Difficult to Work With

Two perspectives, a generalist and a specialist, in one honest conversation. If you have ever wanted more connection at work and wondered how to create it, this is a good place to start.

Most of us have someone at work we find hard to deal with, whether it is the colleague who always has to be right, the one who bristles at the gentlest feedback, or the person whose resistance can turn something simple into something exhausting. We tend to file them under "difficult" and move on, because it feels ‘easier’, but that is often where the real trouble begins.

The problem is that "difficult" tells us almost nothing. It describes how someone makes us feel rather than what is actually going on for them, and once we have decided a person is the problem, we stop being curious about them. We stop asking the question that could change everything,…