How to deal with toxic co-workers, managers

November 2, 2011

How to deal with toxic co-workers, managers

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By Rex Huppke The Chicago Tribune

Q: How do you deal with a toxic co-worker or manager?
-- Anonymous, via email

A: Because you can’t “unfriend,” “unfollow,” or “delete” a person you cross paths with each day -- and because laser guns have yet to be invented -- a bad-seed colleague is a nettlesome and common problem.

Dorothy Tannahill Moran, an Oregon-based career development expert and founder of a company called Next Chapter New Life, gave me some of the more smart and pragmatic thoughts I’ve heard on wrangling with toxic co-workers.

“For the majority of people that you’re going to encounter at work, standard operating procedure for behavior is just fine: Just be yourself,” she says. “But then you’re going to have outliers where that’s just not fine. That means you have to adapt, and you need to be smart about what you’re adapting to.”

Here’s where it gets sneaky!

Moran suggests observing the behavior of the problem person, understanding the circumstances that trigger undesired behavior and the type of response the person has to those situations. In essence, know your enemy.

The better you understand how that person behaves, the more skilled you can be at working around him or her.

“All too often we get hooked into emotional responses, and that continues to perpetuate the problem,” Moran said. “You need to rise above it and think, ‘What is this person doing that’s tweaking me, and what are the situations where this happens?’ Then you can problem-solve.”

Try various approaches to dealing with the person to see which works best. Make a game out of besting the toxic person with stealth.

And if that doesn’t work, laser guns can’t be that far off.