Difficult Colleagues Decoded
The Why And How to Handle Them
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
A meeting with the business was scheduled, and we went ready to prepare the groundwork for a new project. We had a set of questions ready beforehand, the format of the meeting was ready, and we were happy to finally start the first steps of a marathon project ahead of us. We joined the meeting online, we presented ourselves, but the meeting was hijacked by one person from the business. It was the first time we had an opportunity to meet and talk. She refused to answer some of our questions and cut the meeting short. It was… weird. It wasn’t a client or someone outside the organization; it was a colleague. For some reason, the ambience was very, very hostile. I think we all might have stories about colleagues that are hard to work with, and yes, being part of the leadership layer can make things… easier. However, these events are bound to happen eventually, and the trick is how to get around it.
Don’t take it personal
This should be stamped on a T-shirt because it is valid in a multitude of situations. When a colleague is hostile, most of the time, it is not because of the person but because of the context.
Let's review the example above. Our colleague was unpleasant; however, she wasn’t disrespectful. Her feedback was that the information we required had already been given in the past, and she didn’t want to waste time giving the same answers. That's a valid point, right? The problem isn’t us, but the context in which she felt that a significant amount of time had been spent on workshops and that the information was not capitalized (However, what she failed to mention was that the workshops were held in French, and on an international team, 90% of the members only understood “Bonjour”). The problem wasn’t us, and it was not because she didn’t like us (she doesn’t); she simply didn’t want to lose time (aka lack the will to facilitate a major project). Of course, her point could have been made more cordially, but the main message is that it wasn’t personal.
I experienced another example with Mr. P, an IT Architect known for his rude rants and his way of telling people to “F yourself” when asked to do certain jobs. He didn’t have a problem with Mr. A, B, or C. The problem was that his management failed to decentralize the enormous amount of work that Mr. P was handling. If someone has “fixing problems” in their job description for years, without proper knowledge transfer to their peers, that person might become angry all the time because of this continuous cycle of fixing everybody else’s mistakes. Again, it is not personal to you, me, or Mr. A, B, or C.
Get the root cause of it
The most important part of understanding a difficult colleague is determining the “why”. Understanding the root cause goes a long way toward figuring out a strategy to handle a difficult colleague. Overwork, for example, is at the root of issues with so many difficult colleagues. Imagine you need to constantly dispatch work and have little time for things to go wrong (very difficult to imagine, I know). On top of that, a colleague comes to you with even more work that should be done elsewhere, or you are constantly fixing someone’s screw-ups. It is not easy to remain friendly in these conditions, and companies have a lot of these cases.
Some years ago, I had a difficult Project Sponsor who was famous for being particularly challenging in the way she handled people and her style of communication. Once I was onboarded and had my first meetings with this difficult stakeholder, I understood that she had her hands tied for years, without clear solutions from IT while trying to address customer needs. For example, she was not a technical person, yet she had been asking for a set of API endpoints for years to replace sending CSV files for integrating data into the client’s systems. This was never done due to the company’s security and governance challenges. It was neither of our faults. However, she had faced these kinds of battles for almost a decade. It turned her into a difficult person to handle. With an understanding of the 'why', I could figure out ways to minimize the challenges and propose a strategy for improving things.
Offer Solutions. Not Problems.
The main takeaway is that there are two paths forward: to be part of the solution or to be part of the problem. If we manage to understand why a colleague is so difficult to handle, we can try to find solutions and strategize how to implement them. It's highly likely that our difficult colleague sees everyone as a problem. Yet, if you distinguish yourself as being part of the solution, you might get that person's attention. The good kind of attention. This means it is important to come up with solutions to their pain points and find a way to collaborate in a conversation where those ideas could be solidified and transformed into real actions. However, be mindful that in a corporation with a lot of consultants (aka having a significant amount of staff that is temporary for a given project or goal), this strategy can also be used by them to take what they want. This means that some consultants might try to manipulate the situation by promising things that will never see the light of day, making the relationship with a colleague better for the short period needed for their initiative. Once the initiative is done, it is up to us and manage the false promises and handle a difficult stakeholder. In practice, there might be cases in which strategizing a solution won't be enough, and our difficult colleague will only get better once they see actual results.
We talked a lot about overwork. However, another big reason why a colleague presents a particular challenge to us is because their priorities don’t match the project’s priorities. This happens everywhere in an organization, since all companies struggle to have a unified way of handling a set of objectives. If this is the case, it is important to find a solution with management so that the project receives the right amount of priority from the stakeholder whose contribution you need. If the result is that the project doesn’t have the priority you need, at least you have an answer that needs to be addressed in your strategy to move forward. For example, I had a case where a particular IT Architect was very difficult to manage and rarely had time for us. So, once we realized his priorities weren’t at all aligned with our migration project, we checked with management to find alternatives. We got an equally bad-humoured IT Architect; however, he received direct instructions to help us out. Is this a wonderful, radiant solution? No, it isn't. It's s$%t. But it is better than someone not being present at all and negatively impacting all the technical validations. At least we had someone whom we could reach and who would work with us. If people want to get moody, it is their choice, not ours.
If it doesn’t work, it needs to get ugly.
This part of the article is for the last resort. It is for when we have tried to understand the problem, offered solutions, and yet the difficult colleague is not collaborating in the way we would like, and is impacting the project team's ability to deliver results.
We aren’t asking anyone’s favours. People are paid to do their work.
This is key to understanding if you are reluctant to move to more direct tactics, even if you would feel bad pushing someone a bit. The project has a goal, and you are paid to fulfill a set of objectives. In the same way, that difficult colleague is paid to work and contribute to the company’s guidelines, objectives, and strategy. If you are not asking for anything illegal or outside corporate policy, and you have a clear mandate that the person should help your project, you are clear to go forward and ask for things.
Escalation. Your Best weapon.
Escalation is more than just sending an email to your colleague’s boss. It needs to be done correctly. If a PM is expecting to have a challenge with a particular colleague, they should prepare their leadership and other key management regarding the importance of having stakeholder engagement. However, not all projects are created equal. I had projects that nobody really cared about, and it was really difficult to get the right amount of stakeholder engagement. In these cases, it took a lot of talking with key managers to make them see our way and find timeslots where my project could fit into their agenda. I also had projects for which I had a direct line to a C-Level manager who could trigger any sort of action I needed. In both cases, an escalation email should not be a surprise. It should be part of an agreed strategy with management on both sides to alert them to particular situations.
Of course, there are cases where sending an email to ask someone to do some tasks and adding their boss in CC might work. However, if the difficult colleague is a key member of the team, their leadership might have challenges handling that person, and our “favourite” colleague might not even care that their boss is in CC. Actually, it can make things worse, and they might ignore the email entirely. This is why it is important to have an agreed-upon escalation strategy with both parties. Otherwise, it will just be a source of frustration for the project team because it will generate limited results. For example, I was parachuted into a project where the key complaints were a lack of response and feedback from the network team (a one-man show). During a Steering Committee meeting, I proposed setting up weekly follow-up meetings to address blocking issues. The CTO himself proposed sending an email each time a topic needed to be addressed with urgency. I followed this strategy for a few weeks, only for the cases in which we needed CTO intervention, and it worked. It took time to sort things out, but it worked.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur