Difficult or just different?
Dealing with ‘difficult’ people is never easy…
Are you a difficult person?
I’m pretty sure that no-one goes around carrying an internal label about themselves that says ‘I’m a difficult person’.
And we’ve all had to deal with difficult people. You mention someone’s name - the eyes roll and you usually engender a fair amount of sympathy if you are about to have to deal with that ‘difficult’ person.
It’s great and necessary to have the skills, self-awareness and resilience to deal with people we find difficult, but I wonder if there really is a universal definition of a ‘difficult person’. Or is the phenomenon that we are dealing with just that people are different, agendas don’t align and we are not always aware of their back-story?
This is a subject that is more than a ‘blogsworth’ but here are a few ideas for how you might re-frame how you interact with a difficult person:
Talk to them - don’t avoid the ‘difficult’ conversation - or the situation will get worse.
Acknowledge that you may have different views on specific topics rather than assuming that you have different views about everything.
Use genuine curiosity to dig a little deeper about why they think what they think
Listen to what they have to say in their language
Imagine this scenario:
You are a project manager on a technical project and you’ve overheard rumours about what the difficult person thinks about testing.
Rather than challenging the person with a statement - eg ‘I hear you think the project should have invested more in testing’
Try asking a question - eg ‘I’m interested to know what you think about the project’s approach to testing?’
You never know there might be some useful insights that you haven’t thought of.
There will always be differences and some people really can seem like a pain in the neck, but everyone has their strengths and if you can find ways to bring the difficult people with you, the results are likely to be much more powerful and your life will probably be a bit less stressful.
Please do get in touch If you want help with your change agenda: [email protected]
