They say you choose your friends but not your family. Where do colleagues fit it? We spend more time with our work colleagues than we do with our friends or family yet we don’t really have a choice in who they are. You may become friends with some of them, admire a few and consider others decent co-workers. So what happens when day in day out you have to deal with difficult personalities?
As with beauty, difficult is indeed in the eye of the beholder. In this context, difficult refers to anyone who makes your life at work stressful or unpleasant, or someone who frustrates you for any number of reasons. Essentially, anyone who even by just thinking about them, you struggle not to use unpleasant adjectives!
Here are a few common “difficult” workplace personalities. Think about how many of these you have encountered or indeed, shock, horror, could you be one of them? Here are the ABCs (and Ds!) of challenging work personalities.