In a team development session, two people in attendance had each decided the other was difficult to work with.
Over time, they had found ways to avoid each other. They scheduled around each other, routed work through other people, and divided projects in ways that looked like thoughtful delegation but were really just avoidance.
What the Room Revealed
Partway through the session, we asked each person to reflect in writing on three things: what they are like at their best on a team, what tends to happen when they’re under pressure, and what actually helps them in those moments.
Then we asked each person to choose someone in the room to share what they’d written.
These two chose each other.
No one suggested it. No one arranged it. They looked across the room and sat down together, with something real to go on instead of the story each had been carrying about the other for months.
What came out of that conversation stayed between them. But I’ve seen this often enough to know what it usually means.
The Label vs. the Information
“Difficult” is often just the word people reach for once they’ve stopped trying to understand someone and started managing around them instead.
What’s underneath the tension, how someone responds when the pressure is on, what actually helps them in those moments: that layer rarely gets spoken. Most teams are never given the language, the tools, or the setting to have those conversations.
And a leader often feels it in their gut long before they can name it. Something is standing in the way. The friction is real, and the cost is real. But identifying what’s actually underlying the dysfunction is not a leader’s day job, and naming what isn’t being said takes a kind of bravery that most team cultures don’t make easy.
So the label holds. People carry it instead of the information that would actually change something.
What the Label Costs
Left alone, the chasm grows wider. Trust erodes. People start protecting their work from someone they’ve already written off. Eventually someone shuts down or leaves. And the label holds.
For a leader, that label is expensive in ways that rarely show up on a scorecard. You lose the version of the team where those two people actually work well together. You lose what they’re capable of producing together, without ever finding out what that could have looked like, because the label closed the door before anyone checked what was behind it.
Who on your team have you already decided is difficult, and how long has it been since you actually knew why?
