What I Wish I Had Known About Dealing with Difficult People
And 5 strategies I shared with a 30 year old colleague.
A junior colleague asked for help in correcting a vexing problem. In essence, she felt that her boss and team unjustly perceived her as whiny, competitive, angry and unwilling to receive feedback from others.
From her perspective, she was condescended to, micromanaged and even betrayed by duplicitous, back-biting peers who expertly offloaded their work onto her whenever the projects became tedious, laborious, or wrought with obstacles.
She also felt that she had been stripped of any autonomy in making even the most minute creative or editorial decisions. As the junior member of the team, she was catching all the proverbial “shit that rolls downhill.”
As an observer who interacts with same players and knows a bit of context and info about the personalities and overall situation, this is what I knew:
Her boss is an amazing and complicated mentor. She’s tough, free-spirited, and seems to thrive in intense situations. Outside of work, she’s navigating a messy, drawn-out divorce with an obsessive, borderline scary ex-husband while raising two small children. She manages a rotating shift of nannies who abruptly exit once they assess a true scope and dynamics of the job requirements. Her life…
