Working Through a People Problem: Three Moves

When a people situation at work becomes a challenge, the reflex is to react quickly and resolve the problem. The more effective skill is to read the situation, including what it is stirring in you, and choose deliberately.

Every leader experiences this regularly: someone on the team becomes a problem. They snap in a meeting. They go quiet when you need them engaged. They push back hard, miss the thing, react badly to feedback, or just make the work harder than it needs to be. And in the moment, something in you wants to respond immediately: to smooth it over, to correct it, or to conclude something final about who they are.

The reflex to react fast might be the wrong one, because these situations are not all the same, and they do not all call for the same move. Some want to be left alone. Some need to be addressed head-on. And some are asking you to look at yourself before you do anything about them. The actual skill is not any one of those responses. It is reading the situation accurately enough, including your own part in it, to know which one you are in.

Here are the three moves, and how to tell them apart.

Move One: Let It Pass, and Don’t Take It Personally

Perhaps what reads as a “people problem” is just a person having a hard moment. Someone under real pressure snaps. Someone mid-crisis goes short with you. Someone blows off steam in a way that lands on you but was not really about you.

The skill here is to see it as it is, a person under load, rather than as an affront that demands a response. This is harder than it sounds because of a reliable quirk in how we read other people. When we explain our own bad moments, we reach for circumstance: I was slammed, I had not slept, it had been a brutal week. When we explain someone else’s, we reach for character: they are hostile, they are checked out, they have an attitude. Social psychologists named this the fundamental attribution error. For others, we overweight disposition and underweight situation, precisely the opposite of how we account for ourselves (Ross, 1977).

Applied here, it is a correction worth making on purpose: before treating someone’s bad moment as information about who they are, ask what they might be inside of. Often the more accurate read is “this person is having a hard time,” not “this person is a problem,” and the right response to a hard moment is to let it pass without making it mean more than it does. Not every reaction needs to be turned into a conversation. Some just need room.

The tell that you are in this situation: it is out of character, it tracks with something they are under, and it does not repeat. If that is what you are looking at, the move is to absorb it, not address it, and not build a case out of a bad Tuesday.

Move Two: Address It Directly

Sometimes, though, it is not a passing moment. It is a pattern, a recurring behavior that is actually affecting the work, the team, or the person themselves. Letting that pass is not generosity; it is avoidance, and it usually gets worse.

The skill here is the opposite of the first: naming the thing directly and cleanly, without either exploding or dissolving. The reason this is difficult is worth understanding, because it is the same reason many leaders avoid it. Saying the true, uncomfortable thing to someone requires staying connected to them and holding your own position while they are upset with you. The psychiatrist Murray Bowen described this as differentiation: staying emotionally connected to someone without being absorbed by their reaction, while maintaining your own clear position under relationship pressure (Bowen, 1978). The poorly differentiated move is to soften the message until it carries no weight because you cannot tolerate their displeasure. This is how difficult conversations get avoided under the morality of kindness.

Addressing it directly does not mean cruelty or chaos. It means: this is the pattern I am seeing, here is its effect, and I need to understand what is going on. It means saying this while staying stabilized, staying in the relationship, and not backing off simply because the conversation becomes uncomfortable. It also means genuinely holding the other person’s mind while you do it, remembering that they have their own logic and their own account of the situation that you may not yet have (Fonagy et al., 2002). Direct does not mean you have already decided. It means you have decided to have the conversation instead of avoiding it or building a silent case.

The tell that you are in this situation: it repeats, it is affecting the work or the team, and letting it go would be avoidance rather than grace.

Move Three: Look Inward

You are reacting to this person more intensely than the situation seems to warrant. They irritate you out of proportion. The strongest signal is not necessarily the behavior in front of you; it is the feeling rising in you. You are suddenly anxious, off-balance, ashamed, or braced for attack, more than the moment appears to justify. Something about being around this person puts you into a state.

Are they contributing to this feeling, or is a personal tripwire being activated? When that happens, the first move is not to act on the feeling. It is to examine it. The examination turns on one question: What is this reaction telling me about myself, the other person, and the interaction between us?

The reaction can point in several directions, and those directions call for different responses. Sometimes the feeling is genuinely yours: an old sensitivity or familiar relational pattern that this person happens to activate. Psychoanalytic theory offers another possibility. Sometimes the feeling arising in you may be partly shaped by the interaction itself. Klein and Bion described this through the concept of projective identification: a person struggling to tolerate fear, chaos, shame, or helplessness may behave in ways that evoke a corresponding state in someone else. The process is rarely deliberate, and the feeling cannot tell you with certainty where it originated. But it may offer useful information about what is happening between you (Klein, 1946; Bion, 1962).

This is why the feeling, correctly read, can become information rather than interference. If you can feel the fear, chaos, or shame and continue asking what it may be telling you, you can stay steady in the middle of the interaction instead of being swept into it. That steadiness is itself an intervention. A person struggling to contain a difficult emotional state may need someone who can receive what is happening without becoming overwhelmed by it, rather than someone who catches the state and escalates it. The clinical name for that capacity is containment, and it is much of the work here.

The practical move, then, is to pause on the feeling before acting on it: What am I feeling with this person, and what might it be telling me? Would I feel this with most people in this situation, or is it specific to them? Is this an old, familiar feeling of mine, or a state that seems to arise in this particular interaction? You will not always be sure, but the act of asking is what keeps you from mistaking a feeling shaped by the interaction for a fact about yourself, or your own tripwire for a fact about them.

One quieter check belongs here too. If you notice the same strong reaction to many different people, that pattern is worth looking at in yourself. A reaction that recurs across many targets may be more likely to reflect something you are carrying. But hold that lightly, because recurrence can also reflect a recurring interpersonal pattern rather than your own baggage. The recurrence tells you to look; it does not tell you the answer.

Knowing Which One You Are In

The whole skill is the sorting, and the three tells provide a working guide. If the behavior is out of character and tied to something the person is carrying, it is usually a moment to let pass. If it is a genuine pattern affecting the work, it usually needs to be addressed directly. And if a strong feeling is rising in you, such as anxiety, chaos, shame, or the urge to react, the first move is to examine that feeling and ask what it may be telling you about yourself, the other person, and the interaction.

Most real situations contain some of all three, which is exactly why the reflex to react immediately fails. It selects a response before reading which situation you are actually in. The discipline is to slow down enough to run both reads at once: an honest read of them, including what they may be inside of, what the pattern is, and how they understand the situation; and an honest read of what is happening in you. Those two reads together can tell you which move the moment requires.

A people problem at work is rarely only a problem in the other person, and rarely only a problem in you. It is something happening between you, and working through it well begins with resisting the fast reaction long enough to see it clearly. Sometimes clarity says: this is a hard moment, let it be. Sometimes it says: this is real, address it directly and stay in the room while you do. And sometimes it says: the strongest signal here is my own reaction, and I need to steady myself before I act on it.

The leaders who handle people well are not the ones with the best technique for confrontation or the greatest patience for absorbing bad behavior. They are the ones who can tell, in a given moment, what the situation actually needs. They read the other person and themselves at the same time, and let the full picture, rather than the reflex, choose the response.

References

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

Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.

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

Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.

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.