Office Politics: Dealing With Difficult People

Let's be real about what it means to stay professional in an office stocked with insecure, aggressive people. Most of us show up wanting to do the work and keep our heads down. Then there are days when someone on your team decides to come after you. Not with fists. With comments, exclusion, the slow drip of mental and emotional jabs that leave you sitting at your desk thinking, why can't they just leave me alone? It is rarely that simple.

There is almost always one coworker who resents what you can do. Insecure people, and I've watched this play out among women especially, can turn catty and jealous and intimidated when someone around them is capable. If that's happening to you, you're far from the only one.

I want to save you some time on an idea that feels tempting: fighting back does not get you out of office drama. I tried it. It doesn't work. And no, switching jobs won't hand you a drama-free paradise either. The perfect workplace isn't a thing. What you can actually build is the ability to move through the mess without letting it run you.

I won't rehash why cliques form or why grown adults act immature at work; I covered that elsewhere. The short version is that plenty of people never figured out how to leave their personal baggage at the door. So some coworkers pour their energy into making your day worse. When that happens, you'll want to vent, and venting is fine. Just watch who you choose. Miserable people love an audience, and some of them will file away everything you say to use later. Eventually even your sympathetic listeners get tired and tell you to just deal with it. You can deal with it. Here's how.

First, read your environment before you react. Some offices give you room to address a person directly about their behavior, but tread carefully. People are skilled at flipping a confrontation so you come out looking like the aggressor, and you don't want trouble maker attached to your name. Usually the smarter move is to tell your supervisor early, well before things boil over past what you can tolerate. How your supervisor responds tells you whether to push the issue or let it drop. Sometimes letting it drop is the win.

Second, don't sweat the small stuff. If people are talking about you, odds are you're doing something worth talking about. Coworkers get rattled by anyone who stands out, particularly when they imagine themselves competing with you. Practice letting it slide off.

Third, protect yourself and protect your paycheck. If your supervisor signals that the right path is to forgive but not forget, then forgive and don't forget. Keep your own copies of your work. Lock your office if that's an option. Write down every incident with a coworker, with dates. It may feel paranoid. It isn't. You have no idea who is quietly documenting you.

Fourth, stay a team player no matter what. This is the hard one, because sometimes you'd rather not be on the team at all. Be professional anyway. Upper management is watching how you react, testing you whether they admit it or not. Steady, positive behavior over time makes the people who started the trouble look like exactly what they are. Don't ever hand anyone the ammunition to say you can't work with others. That reputation trails you for the rest of your career.

Fifth, know when to respond. I was in my Sunday school class one week when a church member described her own trouble with coworkers. She was living in a hostile work environment, and her supervisor had told her to be the bigger person: polite, professional, cordial. When the day ends, your emotions belong to you. You need to be able to function in any situation that gets thrown at you. The immature ones are afraid of a specific future: that someday you'll be their boss, and that next to you they'll keep looking incompetent in front of their peers and the people above them.

Heather Browning, MBA, BA