Nobody loves going to work all the time, but if you find that you’re actively dreading the prospect of heading to the office each day then it’s time to do something about it. If there’s someone in the office whose bad attitude is seriously souring the atmosphere, they are unlikely to fix things themselves; instead, you need to take proactive steps towards figuring out just what their problem is – and how you’re going to help them fix it.
It’s usually the case that a bad attitude like this can be traced back to negative festering away deep down. Perhaps your difficult colleague feels under or over-worked, out of their depth, or underappreciated. There’s nothing quite like insecurity to make someone snappy and uncooperative. For this reason, critiquing their attitude by itself is unlikely to fix things for long – you need to get to that root cause and try to deal with it.
[RELATED: How to Keep it Classy With Difficult Coworkers]
This isn’t easy because, as we’ve already ascertained: this is not a pleasant person to talk to. But if you lay some ground rules about talking to each other with respect, and you use body language and spoken techniques that encourage trust, you should be able to get down to the nitty-gritty facing too much hostility. After all, oftentimes the hostility is just a symptom of being unable to express whatever’s on a person’s mind in the first place. They may just be waiting to be asked if they’re okay.
This guide to working with difficult colleagues provides a great roadmap to dealing with such a situation. Take a deep breath before you get involved, because you’re going to need to be the calm one here – but with empathy and to be gently assertive, there’s no reason why you can’t begin to resolve this situation.
How to Deal With a Difficult Coworker [INFOGRAPHIC]
