Difficult People at Work: The Two-Way Read

The person in front of you is information. So is your reaction to them. Reading only one leaves you with half the picture — usually the wrong half.

Most advice about difficult colleagues is a list of tactics: set boundaries, listen actively, address the behavior, stay professional. All fine, and none of it is the actual skill. The skill underneath the tactics is a way of reading the situation — and it runs in two directions at once. What's driving the other person, and what's happening in you as you deal with them. Both are data. Most people read one and miss the other, and which one they miss is fairly predictable.

Reading the other person: behavior is a signal, not a verdict

When someone is difficult — the critic who finds fault with everything, the colleague who goes cold, the person who dominates every room — the fast instinct is to file them under a trait. He's just arrogant. She's impossible. That's who they are.

That instinct has a name and a well-documented pull. Lee Ross called it the fundamental attribution error: we over-attribute other people's behavior to their character and under-attribute it to their situation (Ross, 1977). We read the difficult behavior as the person, and skip almost entirely over what they might be responding to — the pressure they're under, the threat they're perceiving, the thing that happened before they walked in.

The corrective isn't to excuse the behavior. It's to treat it as a signal about a state rather than a verdict about a character. This is what clinicians call mentalizing — holding in mind that the other person has a mind of their own, with its own separate view, premises, and pressures you can't directly see (Fonagy et al., 2002). The critical colleague may be managing their own fear of being exposed; the one who went cold may be protecting something; the dominator may be more anxious than secure. You don't actually know which — and that's the point. Mentalizing isn't guessing correctly. It's holding the behavior as a question about what's driving it, rather than closing the question with a label.

One caution, because it's where this goes wrong: reading behavior as a signal doesn't mean confidently diagnosing someone's insecurity from the outside. "He's critical because he's insecure" is just the attribution error wearing a more sophisticated coat — you've swapped one confident verdict for another. The honest version stays open: something is driving this, I don't fully know what, and I'll get further assuming there's more to it than the surface.

Reading yourself: your reaction is data too

Here's the half almost everyone skips. Your own reaction to a difficult person is information — often about the interaction, sometimes about you, and worth examining rather than just acting on.

Some of what you feel is being genuinely evoked by the other person. Object-relations theory has a name for the way strong feelings get transmitted in a charged interaction — one person's unmanaged state pressuring the other into feeling something on their behalf. Bion's work on how one mind takes in and holds another's raw feeling describes exactly this: sometimes the frustration or unease you feel around someone is, in part, information about what they're carrying and couldn't hold themselves (Bion, 1962). Your reaction can be a readout of the interaction, not just noise.

But some of what you feel is yours — and this is where honest self-reading matters. If a particular kind of person reliably gets under your skin, if your reaction is out of proportion to what actually happened, if you're more defensive with this colleague than the situation warrants, that pattern is pointing at something in you: an old dynamic, a sensitivity, a place where their behavior is landing on something prepared to receive it. The useful question is the one the tactics lists never ask: why am I reacting this strongly, and what does this remind me of?

The skill is sorting the two — what's being evoked by them versus what's being triggered in you — and you can't sort it by assuming. You sort it by noticing the reaction, holding it as a question, and being honest about your own part. A reaction you act on blindly runs you. A reaction you can read gives you information and puts you back in choice.

Why both directions are one skill

These aren't two separate techniques. They're the same move — treating behavior as information rather than verdict — applied outward and inward at once.

And they correct each other. Read only the other person and you risk becoming an armchair diagnostician, generating tidy theories about everyone's psychology while staying blind to your own contribution. Read only yourself and you can spiral into over-responsibility, taking ownership of a dynamic the other person is genuinely driving. Held together, they produce something more accurate than either alone: a read of the interaction that accounts for what they brought, what you brought, and how the two are meeting.

This is also what separates it from the tactics. "Set a boundary" is a fine instruction, but which boundary, delivered how, depends entirely on your read of what's actually happening — whether this person is overwhelmed and needs steadiness, or pushing and needs a firm line, or triggering something in you that's making an ordinary interaction feel like a threat. The tactic is only as good as the read underneath it.

In practice

Before labeling the person, ask what they might be responding to. Not to excuse it — to widen the frame past the trait. What pressure, threat, or history could be driving this behavior? Hold it as a question you can't fully answer, not a diagnosis you've settled.

When your reaction is strong, treat that as a signal to examine, not just to act on. Strong, fast, disproportionate reactions are the ones most worth pausing on. Some of what you're feeling may be real information about them. Some may be yours. Both are worth knowing before you respond.

Ask the self-question the situation makes uncomfortable. What's my part in this dynamic? Why this person, this strongly? What does this remind me of? The difficult people who activate us the most are usually the ones with the most to teach us about our own patterns.

Then choose the response, instead of letting the reaction choose it. The whole point of reading both directions is to act from information rather than from impulse — which is the difference between managing a difficult interaction and being managed by it.

The reframe

A difficult person at work is not simply a problem to be handled with the right technique. They're a situation to be read — in both directions. What's driving them is a question worth holding open rather than closing with a label. What they stir in you is information worth examining rather than just discharging. The people who navigate these dynamics well aren't the ones with the best scripts. They're the ones who can read the interaction accurately enough to know what the moment actually calls for — including the parts of it that belong to them.

References

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 173–220). Academic Press.