How to Deal With a Difficult Coworker

Name the behavior before you judge the person

“He’s toxic” gives you nothing to work with. “He interrupted me three times in Tuesday’s planning meeting” does. Pin down what is happening first, because the right response to a credit-taker is different from the right response to someone who has gone cold on you.

Before you act, check your read with three quick questions. Do they do this to everyone or mostly to you? Is it new, which might point to something going on in their life or their workload? And can you write down three specific instances with dates? If you cannot find three, wait a week and watch more carefully. You may be reacting to one bad day.

Lines for the moment it happens

Most people freeze in the moment and then replay it for days. Having one sentence ready for each pattern helps more than any amount of resolve.

Notice what these lines do not include: no sarcasm, no comment on the other person’s character, no audience-pleasing jab. You are protecting the work and your place in it. A meeting is a bad venue for the rest of the conversation.

The private conversation, in four sentences

If the pattern keeps going, ask for ten minutes alone. Pick a time when neither of you is rushing to a deadline, and avoid the hour right after an incident when you are still hot. Keep it to one recent example. Bringing a list of six grievances makes the other person defend themselves against all six, and you will spend the whole meeting on the weakest one.

Feedback aimed at the task tends to land better than feedback aimed at the person: in a large meta-analysis of feedback interventions, more than a third made performance worse, and feedback worked less well the more it drew attention to the self rather than the task. (Kluger and DeNisi, 1996) So describe what happened and what it did to the work, and leave their personality out of it. The longer guide on giving and receiving feedback at work covers the same principle for formal reviews.

The four parts are the example, the effect, the request and a question that invites a reply. The question matters. It turns a complaint into a conversation and gives the other person a way to save face. If they get defensive, do not argue the history. Say, “I’m not trying to relitigate Thursday. I’m asking about the next update,” and stop talking.

Keep a dated record from the first week

Notes protect you if things escalate, and they also keep you honest about whether it is really happening as often as it feels. Write them the same day, in a private document of your own (do not copy confidential company files into it).

Keep the tone of the notes flat. “He was being a jerk again” reads as a grudge to anyone you later show it to. “He replied ‘not my problem’ to the vendor question and copied our director” reads as a record.

When your manager or HR needs to hear it

Go to your manager when one direct conversation has not changed anything, when the behavior is affecting deadlines or clients, or when the coworker is senior enough that talking to them directly is not realistic. Frame it around the work and ask for something specific:

Skip the direct conversation and go straight to your manager or HR if the behavior involves harassment, discrimination, threats, or anything unsafe. Ask HR what process follows a report, and send a short written summary afterward so there is a record of what you raised and when. Your employer’s written policy tells you the formal options; for questions about your legal rights, an employment lawyer is the right person to ask, not a coworker or a website.

Moves that usually make it worse

• Reply-all corrections. Even when you are right, the whole team watches a fight instead of the work.
• Recruiting allies by venting to teammates. It feels like support, and it splits the team into camps that outlast the original problem.
• Matching their tone. A clipped email back gives them a clipped email of yours to forward.
• Saying nothing for six months, then arriving at HR with a thick file and no record of ever having raised it with anyone.
• Labeling them. Calling a colleague a narcissist, in private or in a meeting, will be quoted back to you, and it shifts the topic from what they did to what you said.

Whether people feel able to raise problems at all depends partly on the team: in a field study of 51 manufacturing teams, a shared sense that it was safe to take interpersonal risks went with more help-seeking and error reporting. (Edmondson, 1999) That shared sense has a name, psychological safety. If your team punishes anyone who raises an issue, that is a problem for your manager to fix, and your notes become more important, not less.

Stop the Saturday replay

The coworker you cannot stand often gets more of your weekend than your friends do. When you catch yourself replaying the meeting, try replaying it as if you were watching from the back of the room, asking why it got to you. In two experiments where people recalled something that had made them angry, those who asked why from that kind of distanced view felt less renewed anger than those who relived the scene from inside it. (Kross and colleagues, 2005) Those were short lab tasks, so treat it as a technique to try, not a guarantee.

Give the problem a fixed slot instead: ten minutes on Sunday to update your notes and decide your one move for the week, then close the document. If the replay has hardened into a grudge you carry everywhere, the page on why resentment lingers explains what keeps it going. For the physical side of staying steady in a tense meeting, see emotional regulation at work, and if criticism from this person stings more than you think it should, how to handle criticism without getting defensive helps you sort the fair parts from the unfair ones. If you want a broader look at how you tend to respond when someone pushes your buttons, the free EQTiger assessment includes scenarios like a teammate taking credit in a meeting.