How to work with a conflict-avoidant person who’s bad-mouthing you. 🎧
, a series where I help a guest — and you and everyone else listening — learn to work with anyone, even difficult people. By difficult, I mean rude, unprofessional, or hostile: bad behavior that wears us down. No one should have to grin and bear it. Change is possible, but the answer isn’t to suppress our emotions or hope the problem-person leaves. Neither is retaliating or shaming them.
LYNNE: Yeah, sure. I’ve been with my organization for close to five years, and about a year-and-a-half ago, maybe two years now, this person joined the organization, and his background is really similar to mine. We actually kind of worked in similar circles outside of our organization before he joined this one. So, when we first started working together, I think he and I were both really excited to have that kind of familiar thought partner in the organization, so it started off really great.
LYNNE: Increasingly icy. I don’t know if I was showing up differently. I didn’t feel like I was showing up differently, but I did notice that he was showing up and saying less and less every time we were meeting, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get information out of him. We have these meetings so that we can kind of stay coordinated, and so I’d ask him, “Hey, what are you working on?” And nothing.
It turned into a two-hour conversation, in part because he would go on these 15-, 20-minute loops. But at the end of it, we really got to a place where it was like, AMY GALLO: OK, so I want to point out a few things that you’ve done right so far, because I think that there is a lot you’ve done right. One is, in your conversation with him and even in your mind, like your mindset, you’re focused on the shared goal, what you actually have in common, what you need to do together in order to work collaboratively, get your work done, achieve your goals.
But I do think one of the first steps for you is to really think about, if we were able to get to a place where, at least maybe eight times out of 10, we felt aligned in partnership, could you get over the resentment, or the frustration, or the exhaustion that you feel? And I don’t say that as in, let’s dismiss your feelings. I don’t want to treat you the same way his boss treated you of like, well, you can handle being upset.
AMY GALLO: Or maybe it’s that your self-deprecation is something he thinks, Oh, I don’t want to do. His interpretation may be like, she’s just out there admitting her weaknesses and her faults, and I don’t want to do that. So, maybe he’s reacting to that in a way where he’s sort of shutting it down or shutting his own ability to be vulnerable down because he doesn’t want to replicate that.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. This is an opening; the fact that his boss has respect for him and works well with him, it might be worth another conversation with the boss. Now that you’ve sort of opened this up, explaining what the issues are, you might say, “I’m invested in making that working relationship better.
And we can probably get into a whole other conversation about why that is. Maybe he just doesn’t have the skills. Maybe he’s conflict avoidant. Maybe, who knows? Maybe he has information you don’t have about why this person’s behaving that way.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Now, being gossiped about, let’s talk about that for a moment, because when you hear things in the organization about what he said, it’s infuriating. You’re also like, what are peopletelling me? Because I think your mind can start to race of like, oh, all these conversations are happening behind my back. And I do think establishing a better relationship with that person hopefully will cut some of that out.
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