How to Manage Difficult People

Regardless of who you are or what you do for a living, you will eventually meet difficult people. In your personal life, difficult people can drain your energy and negatively affect how you think about the world. In the workplace, difficult people can destroy trust, erode morale, decrease productivity, and affect your general quality of life negatively. However, you can find it easier to navigate in time, particularly if you have a framework and strategy for coping with the situation. Understanding difficult behavior and managing it in others can also help you learn more about yourself, including how to manage your own emotions, increase your compassion, and boost your ability to remain patient. 

Expand your knowledge on what makes people “difficult ” and what you can do about them to be more prepared for your next encounter. 

Understanding difficult behavior

According to Psychology Today, the “Big Five” traits that define a person’s personality are [1]: 

1. Openness to experience

2. Conscientiousness

3. Extroversion

4. Agreeableness

5. Neuroticism

Psychologists analyze these traits via questionnaires. The level of each trait quantifies the extent to which a person is difficult or not. 

At the core of each “difficult person” is a tendency toward antagonism. The antagonistic personality breaks down into seven key traits: 

1. Callousness

2. Grandiosity

3. Aggressiveness

4. Suspiciousness

5. Manipulativeness

6. Hostility

7. Attention-seeking behavior

No one knows the exact root cause of antagonistic behavior. In any case, you may recognize, from the above description, several people in your life. Furthermore, you are likely curious about how to deal with them. 

Strategies for managing difficult people

Antagonistic people can have a real challenge in relating to others’ feelings. Sharing the impact of their actions can help increase their empathy and begin seeing things from others’ points of view. 

With that said, the following strategies can help with managing difficult people when you encounter them at work or in your personal life. 

Stay calm and composed

You should maintain composure and stay calm in the face of confrontation rather than argue with the difficult person. Even if your composed demeanor fails to calm them down, it at least allows you to maintain emotional equilibrium and move through your day with minimal distress. 

It’s vital to remind yourself that you can control your body language and, to a great extent, your emotions. If you don’t look aggravated during conversations, then you’re liable not to feel aggravated. 

Tip: Shift your tongue to the lower end of your mouth, push your shoulders back, and stand up tall. Repositioning yourself and changing your body language releases dopamine, providing pleasure, and decreasing the “stress hormone” known as cortisol. 

Use positive reinforcement

You can diffuse confrontation with difficult people by offering them positive feedback, even when it comes to the most mundane of tasks. 

Difficult people tend to be insecure and reactive, and if they feel slighted, they are liable to become hostile. (Things get trickier if the difficult person happens to be your boss.) Let a difficult person know their value, even if their actual contribution was of less than vital importance. 

Find common ground

Try to build a rapport with a difficult person by asking about their hobbies and preferences. Aim for non-controversial topics such as sports, television shows, or career successes. 

You may want to refrain from personal questions at first, but once you’ve fostered a certain ease of communication, you may find a difficult person eventually opening up to you in a more profound way, which could help you understand them and their difficult manner more effectively. 

Adapt your communication style

As a general recommendation, be flexible. One component of the issue with dealing with challenging people is their rigidity. You won’t fix that or get past it by being equally rigid. 

More often than not, being direct seems to be the most beneficial when handling a difficult person. You should never assume to know the nature of a person’s motivations, but you can ask. For example, if a co-worker missed a lot of meetings recently, ask them why and what you can do to help. Make sure to ask in a way that doesn’t make them look like they’re doing something wrong. 

Seek to resolve conflicts

Focus on the issue at hand, not on the person who’s giving you trouble. In fact, be careful not to insinuate anything about the individual’s difficult personality. Stick to the basic facts at hand. 

For effective conflict resolution, tell the difficult person what’s gone wrong, what you’d like to see happen to correct it, and ask how you can help them help you make that happen. 

Know when to involve others

If a difficult co-worker’s behavior crosses the line into harassment, discrimination, or other unethical behaviors, you have recourse to your HR team and immediate superiors. They can determine what to do in terms of corrective punishment, up to even removing a difficult person from their position at your company. 

Speaking outside the workplace, it can be particularly troublesome when the difficult person in your life is someone you love. Some experts recommend counseling when: 

• You experience emotional distance from one another

• You experience loneliness

• Communication is abusive and escalates quickly

• You often find yourself unfairly criticized or put down 

• Your partner develops a fixation on victimhood at your expense

Try not to wait until issues pile up. The longer you wait to seek outside help, the more challenging the issue may be. 

Dealing with specific types of difficult people

Broadly speaking, several different types of difficult people exist, including critics, passive-aggressive individuals, know-it-alls, and gossipers. Explore each in more detail to discover strategies for coping with them. 

The critic: Strategies for handling constant negativity and criticism.

Whether a critic is right or not—and they can indeed be right, even quite frequently—regular, naggingly negative criticism is inappropriate. 

It may be worth your while to listen to a critic: They may be on to something and just have trouble expressing it in a socially acceptable manner. But if that person is just a font of unrelenting negativity, it’s likely best to simply disengage. That sort of critic isn’t trying to help; they’re trying to get a rise out of you for reasons of their own. 

It’s not impossible, of course, that a critic is, at heart, a wounded person toward whom few, if any, people have ever expressed love or concern. You may be able to help turn things around with how you handle the situation. 

The passive-aggressive: Techniques for addressing indirect communication and behavior.

Passive-aggressive people appear initially accommodating, but they will ultimately indignantly resist change or help. They tend to express themselves in a roundabout way, masking their true needs.

What do you do, then? First of all, don’t label them passive-aggressive to their face. That will likely meet with further resistance. 

Using humor can diffuse the sense of indignity and unearned blame passive-aggressive types often feel. The point here is to be careful where you’re placing the blame: Using “I” statements such as, “I have a problem I’d like you to help me solve,” rather than “you” statements such as, “You are a problem that needs to be solved” can help deflect the feeling that sets a passive-aggressive person off. 

The know-it-all: Tips for managing arrogance and condescension.

Know-it-alls are arrogant, condescending, and not necessarily correct about what they insist they know, and they’re unlikely to own up to that. They may respond to the input of others cruelly. Try to let their demeanor roll off your back and address their actual concerns as you understand them. 

Try these three steps for dealing with a know-it-all at work: 

1. Leave the issue alone unless it is greatly important.

2. If you must persuade a know-it-all, figure out how to get them to be less attached to their own beliefs. 

3. In the case that you do persuade a know-it-all, give them the credit for things working out.

The gossip: Strategies for addressing and curbing gossiping behavior.

Some people are more sensitive to gossip than others. However, some gossips intend to harm workmates by complaining about them to the boss. The consequences of workplace gossip include erosion of trust, loss of productivity, damage to reputations, and attrition. 

You may want to confront gossipers about their behavior by addressing what they said rather than the fact that they said it behind your back. Ask them to come to you with any complaints before they go to anyone else with them. 

When to walk away

Some people are just plain difficult, and irredeemably so. They aren’t having a bad day, they didn’t receive an unfortunate medical diagnosis, they aren’t hungry. They’re just difficult, period. 

You’ll have to judge for yourself how much of that you can handle. Routinely dealing with a chronically difficult person can take a toll on your own mental health. So when do you just walk away? You are the only one that can answer that question. 

Understanding difficult behavior: Continue improving your interpersonal skills with Coursera

Knowing how to manage difficult people can transform your personal and professional relationships. Continue learning how to do so and build your interpersonal skills on Coursera with courses like IBM’s People and Soft Skills for Professional and Personal Success Specialization. The University of Minnesota also has a Human Resource Management: HR for People Managers Specialization course, while the University of Michigan offers Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating Immensely Human Interactions.