Dealing with Difficult People

Abstract

At some stage of your working life, you may need to work with a person that you simply cannot get along with, potentially resulting in conflict to arise. He/she is your so-called difficult (or problem) person. Quite often, you will not be able to ignore or walk away from this person. As such, you will need to come up with a suitable strategy in order to cope with your difficult person and the situation that you find yourself in.

The goal for this chapter is to give you advice on how to manage difficult people. The chapter is thus divided into three parts. The first part is all about understanding the intent of a difficult person, so that you can come up with a suitable strategy on how to cope. The second part will give you some general tips on what to do if you are ever in a conflict situation. Finally, the chapter focuses on a special type of difficult person: a bully. I will give you not only more background information bullying, but also more importantly what you should do in order to minimise the negative impact of bullying. I will be presenting some of the options that are available should you ever need to deal with a bully.