An impossible stakeholder or manager. Ego, depth of knowledge or style of communication clashes with yours.
An impossible relationship. It never seems to move beyond confrontation or hierarchy into something more constructive and peer-like.
A lasting conflict.
Such unaddressed conflicts erode trust, stall decisions, and eventually push good people out. The costs are real.
The response, however, is not always obvious.
What do you do?
Leave?
Stay and continue down the same path, hoping the other person changes and risking that you will eventually be asked to leave?
Or stay and go for a change?
Then it is important to acknowledge what is happening and ask a different question:
Think about tennis.
At a Grand Slam tournament, you do not choose your opponent. You do not get to voice that they have a different style, different strengths, or a game that frustrates you.
You study them.
You adapt.
Why should the workplace be fundamentally different?
This does not mean accepting poor behaviour or abandoning your boundaries. It means recognising what you can—and cannot—control.
If you find yourself in a difficult relationship with an important stakeholder, perhaps start here:
1. Understand their objectives.
What are their goals, pressures, and deliverables?
What matters most to them?
Their priorities may be very different from yours. Understanding them does not mean agreeing with them. It means understanding the game you are part of.
2. Understand their style.
How do they make decisions?
How do they communicate?
What do they respond to?
What tends to create resistance?
3. Get clear about what you are trying to accomplish.
What are you trying to deliver?
What do you understand to be expected of you?
What do you want?
4. Understand what is happening within you.
This may be the hardest part.
What are you feeling?
What are your trigger points?
What happens when the conversation becomes difficult?
Are you communicating the issue in a way that makes it easier—or harder—for the other person to engage?
Sometimes the message is right, but the framing is wrong.
Be candid with yourself. There is no judgment here. Only information.
5. Pay attention to what you dislike.
What specifically bothers you about this person—and why?
And, perhaps more uncomfortably, what of this do you recognize in yourself?
Conflict can reveal things about the other person and also about ourselves.
6. Look for complementarity.
What are their strengths? What are yours?
Where do those strengths complement one another?
What is the shared goal?
The objective is not to win in a relationship but to accomplish something together.
Start with what has already been done. Clarify what comes next. Keep bringing the conversation back to the shared objective.
That is where the relationship can begin to change.
And if you are the manager?
Do not delay. Invite the conversation.
Make it possible for people to tell you what is not working.
It may be uncomfortable. However, avoiding the conversation rarely makes the underlying conflict disappear.
Your game improves when you are willing to face the challenge.
Advantage. Game.
The next time you are ready to react, pause.
Ask more questions.
Acknowledge, reflect, and then choose your response.
You cannot control the other person’s behaviour.
You can control your preparation, your response, your boundaries, and how you show up.
Preparation creates calm.
Calm creates space.
And sometimes, the next point is the one that changes the match.
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