Career Advice: Don’t Let Difficult People Stymie Your Career

Unless you are among the luckiest people in the world, or you are totally free of all relationships in the real world, you have to cope with difficult people along your career path.

Some secretaries are habitually late for work; others can’t spell. Customers are often rude. Co-workers can be abusive and uncooperative as they guard their turf. Others may goof off leaving you to pick up the slack. There are bosses who consistently make unreasonable demands and never have a kind word to say. Heaven forbid, you may be difficult sometimes.

Don’t waste your time searching for a utopia where there are no difficult people. Instead, spend your time figuring out how to manage these relationships so that they don’t become roadblocks to your career success and that of the organization.

Career Blockers Come In Seven Forms

In his book, Coping With Difficult People, Dr. Robert M. Bramson identifies seven basic patterns of difficult behavior:

1. Hostile-Aggressive, Bullies.

2. Complainers.

3. Silent and Unresponsive.

4. Super-Agreeables.

5. Negativists.

6. Know-It-All Experts.

7. Indecisives.

Nine Ways To Deal With Difficult People

Do you recognize any of these types? Sure you do. It is easy. The hard challenge is how to cope with them so they don’t impede as you pursue your career goals. Here are nine common sense suggestions that should help.

1. Recognize you are not “just being negative and difficult” yourself when you acknowledge the reality that the world is brim full of difficult people.

2. Keep your eyes on your personal career goals. Don’t let hard-to-get-along-with people become a personal issue. Keep difficult persons in the proper perspective.

3. Remember, you don’t have to like a person to get along with him or her.

4. Recognize you can be difficult, too.

5. Try to understand why difficult people are difficult. Have a strategy to deal with each difficult person who is important to your getting the job done.

6. Be big enough to accommodate with the difficult person, up to a point. Be patient, but not too patient.

7. Try to ignore the person and the situation. Maintain as much distance – physically, organizationally and emotionally – as possible between yourself and the source of difficulty.

8. However, try as you might, there may come a time when it makes common sense to recognize that some relationships are too difficult to live with.

When this happens, draw the line. Go to your boss, explain the situation and ask for him to resolve it by moving you to another position away from the trouble-maker or by correcting or removing that person.

9. Finally, if you have made your best effort along the lines discussed here and the difficulty still exists and it is hurting your personal life and career ambitions, you have but one choice. Suffer the situation or leave for another position.

But keep in mind there will be difficult people wherever your career leads.

I wish you career success!

Ramon Greenwood, Head Career Coach
Common Sense At Work