Dealing with 'Difficult people'

Jan 18, 2020

It happened once again. Jim and I had gone back and forth, and back and forth, on some very minor tactical point. The room was full of people from both our teams, and there was a nervous silence all around. In the silence, Jim's and my voices echoed more stridently than either of us intended. The minutes ticked away on the clock and we had not come to any productive conclusion. I could feel my heart race and a dull pain was developing in my head. It was almost as though I was under attack.
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Jim and I had many common goals, but because of our very different approaches, we often sparred. I used to work with Jim more than a decade ago. He sprang to mind recently when a mentee asked me a question: How have you evolved your approach to handling difficult personas (peers who don’t collaborate) over the years?

Back in the day, I used to think of Jim as a peer who was difficult to collaborate with. This is why he came to mind when my mentee asked me that question. But over the years I have realized that I was mistaken. I had jumped to a conclusion about Jim. I had painted him into a corner in my mind as "uncollaborative" when in fact the situation was more complex.

It is possible for us - especially in the heat of the moment - to rush to a conclusion and personalize blame. Psychologists call it the "fundamental attribution error": the human tendency to ascribe another person's actions to what kind of person he/she is while your own actions to situational factors. If your spouse spills their coffee on the countertop, it is because "she is always careless" while if you do the same, it is because "you are in a rush to drop off the kids". If Jim didn't play nice, it was because "he was uncollaborative". If I didn't play nice, it was because "I wanted to do the right thing for the team".

To be honest, I don’t yet know many details about my mentee's difficult peer. It may very well be that they are hard to work with and need some coaching. But in most tense situations involving two or more people, I have come to realize now that there are several aspects to debug before coming to any sort of conclusion.  
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1. Emotional: How are you feeling in the situation? How is the other person feeling? Are you being threatened in something you hold dear or vice-versa? A wonderful tool to diagnose the emotional angle of the puzzle is the SCARF model, invented by Dr. David Rock, the CEO of Neuroleadership Institute. I have started using it more and more over the years.
2. Logical: This is where presenting your facts and hearing the other person's facts come in. Remind each other of your common goal, and why finding a way to collaborate effectively is important. Present your facts and arguments in a way that appeals to the other person (using stories vs. numbers, e.g.). 
3. Situational: It is important to understand what pressures and agendas the other person has on their mind. A little bit of empathy helps here, and so does active listening to his/her words. You get a lot of insights by "getting on the balcony" and by observing for a while.
4. Cultural: What sort of processes and culture in the team is enabling the situation? What can be done at a macro-level to effect change?
5. Personal: Here is where the kind of person you are dealing with comes into the picture. Perhaps the person does need some help in the form of coaching. Perhaps they are missing some key skills or awareness of how they are coming across. Debugging the personal factors that contribute to the situation - both for yourself and the other person - has a role to play but, in my mind, only as the last step.

When faced with difficult people or situations at work (or life), my advice to my mentee is to pause, breathe, zoom out, and assess all of the above. The logical angle is really the only thing I got right in my own situation with Jim. At that stage in my career, being an analytical as I am, I had missed the other aspects altogether. Thanks to the gravity of what we were trying to achieve together, Jim and I did end up working fabulously together. But if I were to encounter that situation again, I would do it more holistically. It would have helped us in avoiding many a stressful moment for both of us, and our teams.