Using EQ to Deal with Difficult People at Work

There's usually a moment in these situations when you realize the problem isn't the person. It's the dynamic.

I once worked with a leader whose communication style was very different from mine. Expectations weren't always clearly articulated, but the bar for delivery was consistently high. Check-ins were rare. Direction arrived in short, dense emails that assumed a shared context that (if I'm honest) didn't always exist.

For a while, I filled the gaps with assumptions. I wondered quietly whether the distance was personal. I told myself a story about being set up to fail, and then used that story to explain every piece of feedback that didn't land the way I hoped. It took longer than I'd like to admit before I realized I was working harder to defend my interpretation than I was to understand the actual situation.

That's where EQ came in, not as a set of tools I reached for deliberately, but as a framework that helped me look at what was actually happening.

The Easy Story, and the More Honest One

The easiest story would have beenthey're a poor communicator. And there was real evidence for that story. But EQ asks a harder, more uncomfortable question, not what's wrong with this situation, but what is this situation actually about?

Beneath the frustration was an unmet need. I wanted clarity before moving into execution. I needed to feel oriented before I could work with confidence. When that clarity was absent and the accountability remained high, I didn't just feel confused, I felt exposed. And that emotional experience (feeling exposed) was quietly shaping everything,  how I interpreted feedback, how I showed up in interactions, how much energy I spent managing my own anxiety versus doing the actual work.

Once I could see that, I stopped reacting to every ambiguous message as though it were confirmation of something. That's not a small shift. That's self-awareness doing exactly what it's designed to do.

Social Awareness: Understanding Their Emotional Reality

Looking at the same situation through a social awareness lens shifted things further. This leader wasn't withholding clarity. They genuinely believed they were being clear. Their cognitive process was internal and largely complete before anything was communicated outward. By the time an email landed in my inbox, the decision had already been fully formed, debated, and resolved, in their own mind. What felt to me like missing information was, to them, obvious context.

They were also highly introverted, with a strong preference for focused, uninterrupted thinking. Meetings felt disruptive to them. Back-and-forth felt inefficient. What they valued was time to think deeply and communicate precisely, even if that precision wasn't translating for everyone receiving it.

None of that made the dynamic easy. But understanding it helped me navigate. The behaviour that had felt like indifference turned out to be a communication style operating at a significant mismatch with my own. The emotional distance I had interpreted as a lack of regard was actually the natural outcome of two very different working preferences colliding without ever being named.

Social awareness doesn't require you to agree with someone's approach. It requires you to understand it, to replace the story you're telling about their behaviour with genuine curiosity about what's actually driving it.

Self-Regulation: Resisting the Urge to Overcorrect

My instinct, once I identified the problem, was to fix it aggressively. More check-ins. More questions. More explicit requests for clarity. But that actually increased friction. In a dynamic where one person values minimal interaction and the other suddenly starts generating more of it, the result isn't better communication. It's more noise, and more distance.

So instead, I regulated my response. I grouped questions together rather than sending them as they arose. I reflected back what I understood before proceeding, rather than asking for confirmation of every detail. I adjusted my communication to be more precise and less conversational, not because my natural style was wrong, but because adapting to what mattered to them was more likely to produce the outcome I actually wanted.

This is the part of self-regulation that doesn't get discussed enough. It's not just about managing your emotions internally. It's about making intentional choices about how you show up based on what the situation actually requires, rather than defaulting to what feels most natural or most justified in the moment.

Finding Common Ground Without Losing Yourself

Here is the piece that I think gets missed in most conversations about difficult working relationships, high EQ doesn't mean reshaping yourself to suit someone else's preferences indefinitely. It doesn't mean abandoning your own needs in the name of adaptability. It means adapting strategically, while staying anchored to what's actually important.

In this situation, that meant being explicit about a few things we had both been assuming:

·      What "done" actually looked like to them: the specific standard, not just the general expectation

·      When clarification was genuinely necessary versus when I was seeking reassurance

·      How much context was helpful to me versus what crossed into overwhelming for them

When those conversations happened, plainly, without defensiveness on either side,  the dynamic shifted. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But meaningfully. The work improved. My anxiety dropped. Not because either of us became a different person, but because we had finally named the emotional system we were both operating inside.

The Quiet Lesson

That experience changed how I think about difficult people at work, and I use that phrase carefully, because what I've come to believe is that the category of "difficult people" is almost always more complicated than it first appears.

Sometimes the difficulty isn't behaviour. It's misalignment, two people operating from genuinely different assumptions about how good work gets done, and neither one realizing the other's assumptions even exist. Sometimes the tension isn't conflict. It's unspoken expectations, accumulating quietly until they feel like evidence of something that was never actually the problem. And sometimes the work that needs doing isn't changing the other person. It's understanding the emotional system you're both inside, and making one or two different choices about how you move within it.

EQ gave me language for that. And more importantly, it gave me options. When you can see the dynamic clearly, you're no longer just responding to it. You're making decisions about it. That's a fundamentally different position to be in.

A Question Worth Sitting With

If you're feeling stuck with someone at work right now, try this, set aside the question of who's right. Set aside the behaviour that's frustrating you, at least for a moment. And ask instead - what emotional need of mine isn't being met in this dynamic, and how might theirs be different from what I'm assuming?

That question won't resolve everything. Some working relationships are genuinely difficult, and some situations require more than a shift in perspective. But in my experience, that question almost always softens something, enough to see the situation more clearly, and enough to find a way to move.

Interested in building these skills in your team? The Curiate Group works with organizations to develop emotional intelligence as a practical leadership and communication capability. Contact us today to set up a consultation.