how to handle a difficult boss or co-worker

A strained relationship at work can ruin 8 or more hours a day for you. You can change the dynamic when you follow these steps.

Almost everyone at some point in their life had a co-worker or a boss who was difficult to get along with (or just downright hateable). At its core, a professional relationship between two people isn’t really different than a friendship or a romantic relationship with someone - other than the fact that it feels forced because you both need to be there for other reasons like having to pay your bills. And when we recognize this, we have tremendous opportunity to grow in our professional lives by treating these office problems as the interpersonal problems they truly are.

There’s no need to let one person spoil your entire professional life. There are several things you can do to fix the relationship and maybe even help the person who has been antagonizing you.

While you can always leave your job, and sometimes that’s the right decision, often times it may serve your needs more to find a better way to work through the problem rather than uproot yourself every time you’ve got a difficult boss or co-worker.  After all, you might love your job and the work you do, and your work enemy may just be a friend that you haven’t been able to reach yet.

When I’m coaching my clients, I have a few simple strategies that help them get past problems with coworkers or at least understand the relationship better so they can reduce their own personal frustration that way.

1. Grow your empathy - Whenever there is a problem between two people, it’s easy to villainize the other person and assume they’re a bad person who has it out for you. If you want to improve your life, it’s important that you understand this isn’t true. Every person is doing the best they can to meet their basic human needs and sometimes they do so in negative ways. In the workplace, significance is often the need that drives the interactions between people. One of the easiest ways we achieve significance is by cutting people down or stepping on other people - not healthy but all too common. When you understand that the person who is treating you poorly is just trying to not feel small, you can approach the problem from a strategic view, rather than reacting from a negative emotional state.
   
2. Analyze the other person’s six human needs - Anytime you’re in a relationship, professional, romantic, personal, or otherwise, it is good take a look at how you are fulfilling or not fulfilling the other person’s 6 human needs of certainty, uncertainty, love/connection, significance, growth, and contribution. As mentioned in the previous point, the professional world is a significance based world with people trying to get noticed, feel important and useful, and trying to get ahead basically all of the time. The people who are best at building meaningful relationships have an incredible skill at making people extremely important. If people walk away from interactions with you feeling like they are amazing, talented, and important there is little chance they will feel the need to cut you down. All of these needs can factor in at the workplace, though. If someone feels disconnected from their coworkers, they may gossip behind your back to forge friendships and connection with other people. If they have no sense of certainty or safety in their job they will do virtually anything to get it - even if it means taking your sense of certainty away.
   
3. Analyze your own six human needs- Now it’s time to look within. What are you getting out of battling a co-worker or boss at your office? Does trashing your boss curry you favor with your coworkers and get you the connection you need? Does fighting your boss alleviate that feeling of being small and unimportant? These problem relationships, that feel so frustrating and unnecessary, often exist because we are fulfilling our needs through negative means. Take a long look at how this destructive relationship is serving you - it may be meeting your need for uncertainty/variety because you are or bored or ramping up your anger to make you feel significant because you feel overlooked or smaller than you should. When you understand your part in the behavior, we can start to make progress.
   
4. Trade your “safe problem” for a quality problem  -Our lives are riddled with what we strategic interventionists calls “safe problems.” These are problems you have that meet your needs, but aren’t really solvable. They don’t give you room to improve. Quality problems are the opposite - they are problems that give you direction by thinking about solving them. Think about someone saying to themselves “man our boss is a jerk” (safe problem with no course of action) versus “I need to improve my relationship with my boss.” The words we use with ourselves and with others matter. If I’m constantly telling myself that “my boss is a jerk” my mind has framed this as an unsolvable problem that does nothing other than give me an excuse for poor performance or gets me street cred at the water cooler. If you’re telling yourself that you need to improve your relationship with your boss, that is something of which I am very much in control of and can improve upon. Same issue, different frame. Safe problems will not help you move forward and will do nothing other than meet your needs at very low levels and lead to an unhappy life.
   

Following these 4 steps will not only dramatically improve your own mood and performance at work, but they can make you the one responsible for improving and repairing the entire culture of your employer.

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