Don't Be Difficult to Work With

Being “difficult” to work with will undoubtedly hold you back in your career.

Why it matters: At the end of the day, people want to work with people they get along with.

This doesn’t mean you need to be best friends with them and hit happy hour every week.

But at the same time, you’re spending 40 hours a week working with each other. Some of us are now back to working alongside each other in person, too.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about looking for a job, looking for a promotion, or simply existing in your current situation, this is something everyone needs to be cognizant of.

Here are 3 examples of how “being difficult” held back someone’s career in my experience👇:

Looking for a job

I remember working with a Data Engineer in the financial services space. Let’s call her Jane.

Jane was referred to me by another member on the team. They had an opening for a long term contract role so it was natural to present her profile to the HM and mention she was a referral.

Jane was technically very good at her job. She aced the technical interview with flying colors. But the feedback during her interview was that “she seemed very aggressive and kept interrupting myself & the team”. But, this was during the covid zirp era, so she still ended up getting the job offer.

Not too long later, maybe about 8 months, she was let go. The contract was supposed to be 24 months. They said while she was very good with her hard skills, she was just too difficult to work with and “wasn’t worth it”.

I went to try to place Jane at some of our other clients. In short:

• She also kept her aggressive tone despite the feedback. For example, when she was let go, I gave her the feedback, and she replied “Shouldn’t it be your job to convince the client to keep me?”

• When I presented her profile to our other hiring manager and set the expectations to get feedback within 5 business days, she called me 2 days later and asked “Do you actually know this manager? If you did why can’t they respond by now?”

• When we did land her an interview and I asked if I could prepare her, she said “What can you do to prepare me, you are just a recruiter”

Needless to say, she did not pass that interview. I stopped presenting her to my clients. She did end up finding another contract role, was let go again, and then called me for help. I told her based off our previous experience I cannot help her.

Advancing your career

Some of you reading this may have an “arch nemesis” at work, where you compete for each other to become the best on the team. This is definitely common in agency recruiting - I have them myself. And it does sound a little contradictory to mention since we’re writing about “not being difficult to work with” anyways.

But, they exist, and it’s natural you’ll eventually deal with them if you’re not already.

If you are - you need to be careful how you tread.

I credit a lot of my success because I work for such great managers and leaders. But that wasn’t always the case.

My very first manager 10 years ago in the recruiting business was absolutely terrible (I actually wrote a post about this a few weeks ago you can check out).

Long story short - he didn’t like the fact I was taking in more advice from two mentors who were other top sales reps in the company which sometimes contradicted his advice.

As time went on, he got more aggressive towards me, putting me on bad clients and projects, taking credit for my ideas when bubbled up, and was aggressive towards me on situations that he treated as not a big deal to other recruiters.

He was in the running to run the entire recruiting division for the entire company - not just our branch. But at the same time, I had it working for him. I worked my way up to be the top recruiter in the company but couldn’t stand this guy, so I eventually went to my sales manager and the president of the company asking for a transfer to another division or I would have to tender my resignation.

They dug into why I wanted to leave, so I presented clear examples of why I didn’t get along with this manager. They then reached out to other top producers and other branch managers about him, and they had similar feedback. They also didn’t enjoy working with him but they “put up with it” because they thought he was in good standing with the execs.

So it turns out he didn’t get this promotion - although he was probably good enough for it - because simply no one wanted to work with him, let alone for him.

Dealing with your current situation

There’s a fine line between competing with someone internally and absolutely disrespecting them.

Take a look at Lebron James & Steph Curry. They both competed fiercely against each other numerous times, but still respect each other off the court and even play well with each other in the olympics. Too many people out there read a few quotes by Jordan and Kobe thinking they need to be ruthlessly aggressive when 99.99% of us will never get to that level at our crafts.

Most of you who’ve followed me by now know I credit a lot of my success to two mentors. One of them - let’s call him John - was in the biz for 15+ years and really helped me when I started out 10 years ago.

John was very helpful to me for most of my career - but he was your typical aggressive sales rep. Although he was nice to me (because I helped him make money), he was aggressive towards others and even management (also typical for a top sales rep in our industry). But people put up with it because he was very good at his job and made a ton of money for the company.

But eventually, two things happened:

• He really started aggravating too many people - his peers on the ground floor and at the top of the food chain in the exec suite

• His billings started to really decline, so now it came to the question for management “was he worth it” to put up with his antics?

After about 1.5 years of declined performance, but even more aggressive behavior, he was let go. The thing was, even with his declined performance, he was still technically one of the top guys in the company and even the industry.

But it just wasn’t “worth it” to deal with him. Think about this example in sports. How many times have we seen a star receiver - Antonio Brown, Ocho Cinco, TO - or NBA star like James Harden or Dwight Howard - get moved around? They’re extremely talented, but at the end of the day, teams simply didn’t want to deal with them.

Bottom Line:

It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job. Being difficult to work with only has downside and will hinder your career.