Difficult People at Work: The Two-Way Read

Every interaction gives you two sources of information: the person in front of you and your own reaction to them. Understanding people requires learning to read both.

Most advice about working with difficult colleagues offers a list of tactics: set boundaries, listen actively, address the behavior, stay professional. Useful, but none of it is the actual skill needed to really work with people. The real skill is learning to read the interaction in two directions: what's driving the other person, and what's happening in you. Both are data, and together they help you understand what is happening in the room.

Reading the Other Person: Behavior Is Data

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 correction isn't to excuse the behavior. It's to treat it as a signal about a state rather than an indictment 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. Mentalizing isn't about guessing correctly; it's about holding the behavior with curiosity about what's driving it, rather than responding with certainty based on a potentially incomplete read.

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 — you've swapped one confident verdict for another. The mature version stays open to possibilities: something is driving this, I don't fully know what, and I'll get further assuming there's more to it than what is on the surface.

Reading Yourself: Your Reaction Is Data Too

Here's the half most people don't know. Your own reaction to a difficult person is information — often about the interaction, sometimes about you, and worth examining rather than just acting on it.

Psychoanalytic theory offers one way of understanding this through a process called projective identification: one person's unmanaged emotional state may contribute to corresponding feelings in another person. Bion later described how the receiving mind can contain, process, or become overwhelmed by what emerges in the interaction (Bion, 1962). From this perspective, the frustration or unease you experience may sometimes offer information about what is happening between you, rather than simply telling you something about yourself. Your reaction can offer a readout of the interaction.

But some of what you feel is yours — and this is where honest self-reflection matters. If your reaction is consistently stronger than the situation seems to warrant, or if a particular type of person reliably provokes you, it's worth becoming curious. Your response may be pointing to an older pattern, an unresolved sensitivity, or a familiar relational dynamic that the current interaction has activated. 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 learning to read your reaction before responding to it. Some of it may belong to you. Some of it may belong to the interaction itself. The challenge is learning to tell the difference. You can't make that distinction by assuming — you make it by noticing your reaction, holding it with curiosity, and being honest about your own contribution. A reaction you act on blindly controls you. A reaction you can examine becomes information, giving you more choice in how you respond.

Why Both Directions Are One Skill

These aren't two separate techniques. They're the same habit of mind: treating behavior as information, whether you're reading the other person or yourself.

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 why tactics alone aren't enough. "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 might be driving the behavior. Not to excuse it, but to widen the frame beyond the trait. What pressure, threat, or history could be driving this behavior? Hold the answer 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.

Then ask the question most people skip: What's my part in this? Why this person, this strongly? What does this remind me of? The difficult people who activate us the most can teach us a lot 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.

Read the Interaction

A difficult person at work is not simply a problem to solve with the right technique. Every interaction contains two sources of information: the person in front of you and your own response to them. The goal is not to rush toward a label or a script, but to understand what is happening between you. The people who navigate difficult relationships most effectively aren't just good at tactics; they read the interaction clearly enough to know what the situation actually requires.

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.