It seems to be that everyone has that one coworker that they can’t seem to get along with, but here are a few tips to help you along the path of dealing with a difficult coworker.

Today’s post is by Kourtney Whitehead, author of Working Whole. This is an archived guest post, originally published in 2020.

We’ve all worked with someone who makes us roll our eyes, cringe when we see their name in our inbox, or dread an upcoming meeting.  A difficult co-worker can be unavoidable, but we can gain new perspective on how to work with them.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from coaching hundreds to people through job changes, is that difficult coworkers can undermine your career trajectory as well as job satisfaction. Should you find yourself in this situation, here are five tips to make sure you’ve done all you can to turn these negative workplace interactions into productive and positive ones.

Look for root causes. When working with a difficult colleague, we tend to let our negative emotions cloud our ability to make clear observations. This can be compounded if we find ourselves surrounded by others that are quick to offer their own assessment of the person or explanations for the friction between you. Resist the urge to jump to conclusions about what is driving the negative behavior. Spend time learning as much as you can about the life experiences and background of the difficult colleague. If you can engage in a firsthand discussion, that is preferred. But you can learn a lot, even from a distance, if you are paying attention without the chatter of preconceived opinions running through your head. Observe the behavior and question the assumptions you’ve made about it. Behaviors that were previously interpreted as a desire to outsmart everyone, may be masking a fear of being exposed or caught unprepared. Be on the lookout for these kinds of discoveries and shifts in perspective.

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Dogs can teach us a thing or two. Have you ever thought about how to apply canine behavior to your leadership style? There are interesting approaches your dog would encourage you to try if you want to be a better leader.

Today’s post is by Krissi Barr, co-author of The Fido Factor: How to Get a Leg Up at Work. This is an archived post originally published in 2018. 

If you’re like most Americans you love dogs. Unlike a goldfish won at a church festival, people form deep and meaningful relationships with their canine pals.

So what does any of this have to do with leadership? As it turns out, a lot.

Leadership is more art than science, and more emotion than logic. The actions and behaviors that roll up to form an effective leader, when you boil them down, are actually pretty simple. And they are very similar to why we love dogs so darn much.

Dogs are faithful, inspirational, determined and observant. These four core qualities—the Fido Factors—are the basis of the unexpected reason why we can learn leadership lessons from dogs.

Take a dog’s tail. It’s a crystal clear barometer of how they are feeling. Happy and it wags like crazy, guilty and it curls under out of shame. Dogs are simply incapable of hiding how they feel. They can’t lie.

Not so much with humans. Like a professional poker player, most of us have gotten very good at hiding our emotions in the workplace. And while there are times when that’s a good thing, more often than not we’d benefit from wagging our tail a little more.

Dogs don’t hide how they feel. Take a typical day coming home after work. There to greet you at the front door is your dog. His smiling face, a slobbery tennis ball in the mouth and a wagging tail tell you in no uncertain terms how happy he is to see you. This wear-it-on-the-collar approach to life is one of the reasons we love them so much.

Great leaders at work do the same. Well, maybe not the slobbery tennis ball. They aren’t afraid to open up and show emotion. As a result, coworkers feel a stronger connection to the cause.

Ask yourself this: when one of your associates comes back to the office after a long day in the field, how do you react? Do you wag your tail and celebrate their successes or do you hide your tail in your office so no one can see how you really feel?

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In staffing a new facility, by emphasizing talent rather than experience, we eliminated a major barrier to employment and increased our diversity. Can you take the same approach and have the same impact on your organization?

Today’s post is by Larry Sternberg, co-author of Managing to Make a Difference. This is an archived post, originally published in 2017.

Despite research concluding that experience is a poor predictor of professional success(1), in too many situations, organizations designate experience as an absolute “must have,” a ticket to admission, in the hiring process. But lack of experience is the only deficiency that is guaranteed to correct itself over time.

If you hire someone today who has zero experience, I guarantee you that three years from now he or she will have three years of experience. In most cases (I know there are exceptions) elevating experience to a “must have” is simply unwise. In the worst cases, experience requirements become a significant barrier to employment and diminish diversity. But organizations continue to overemphasize experience anyway.

In the mid 1980’s I was Vice President of Human Resources for a newly formed company, The Portman Hotel Company, which was owned by the well-known architect and real estate developer, John Portman. Our first hotel was under construction near Union Square in San Francisco. Mr. Portman made it clear that he expected us to deliver truly extraordinary service. We, the operating team, were challenged to go beyond the current thinking about how to run a luxury hotel. And we were not merely encouraged to do so – we were supported.

Extraordinary service requires extraordinary people. We had to hire 350 people to staff this hotel, and it was evident to us that traditional methods of recruiting and interviewing candidates were inadequate for this challenge. We engaged a firm that specialized in measuring aptitude (they called it “talent”), and we decided to de-emphasize the importance of experience, which substantially expanded our candidate pool. We contacted almost every organization in San Francisco whose mission included helping their constituents find jobs. We said, “Send your people. No experience necessary.”

By focusing on talent rather than experience, we removed one of the most common barriers to employment and thus increased the likelihood of diversity. And the outcome was much better than any of us had hoped. The demographics of our 350-person staff were to the percentage point the demographics of the city of San Francisco.

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Today’s post is by Michael Henderson, author of Above the Line: How to Create a Company Culture that Engages Employees, Delights Customers and Delivers.

Archived Post: This blog was first published in 2015. We’re bringing it back to spotlight a topic that’s worth revisiting.

A company’s culture plays a significant role in driving performance, retaining staff and influencing customer experience. If you agree, then it might be time to look into how your organization identifies its culture. If you’re simply relying on an annual staff engagement survey, you might be surprised, and not necessarily pleased with the results.

Many organizations use staff engagement surveys for establishing the status of employee morale or as a means of positioning an organization as an award-winning place to work. However many organizations are increasingly falling into the trap of relying on their engagement survey tool to define and describe their workplace culture. It’s as Abraham Maslow once noted, “If you only have a hammer as a tool, then every problem is a nail.”  In other words, just because you are already using an engagement survey to assess employee morale doesn’t mean the survey is designed to measure culture.

Engagement surveys may indeed measure many variables within an organization, but culture isn’t one of them. The following are five reasons why engagement surveys are ineffective for revealing your organization’s culture:

1. Opinions are not culture. Engagement survey questions are designed to ask employees their opinions on such topics as; their boss, the warmth of their workplace atmosphere, or whether they perceive they have friends amongst their colleagues. But an opinion of a culture is not the culture itself. For example, if I travel to France and develop a less than favorable opinion of French culture, that does not mean that I have understood or defined French culture, but only that I have formed a biased opinion of the culture. Many organizations fail to make this important distinction and, in doing so, often make decisions about the culture – or the changes required in the culture – based on opinions and not through understanding the cultural dynamics themselves. Most engagement surveys are superficial in their explanation of culture. If you truly want to understand your workplace culture watch it in action in real time on the job and you are likely to see where it works or doesn’t, or whether it leads to collaboration or creativity or not. Rather than asking employees for their opinion on culture, try asking if they find the culture to be collaborative or creative.

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