Introduction
You spend more time with your colleagues than with your family, making difficult workplace relationships a heavy daily burden. Complicated people drain your energy, stall projects, and make you dread Monday mornings.
Ryan Leak argues in How to Work with Complicated People that you can transform these challenging dynamics instead of quitting your job or avoiding the conflict. You shift your mindset, manage your emotional triggers, and apply practical frameworks to difficult colleagues.
The book guides you through understanding the root of workplace friction, adopting intentional mindsets, and mastering specific relational quotients. You will discover answers to several key questions as you read.
- Why do certain colleagues consistently trigger your frustration?
- How do you stop taking difficult behavior personally?
- What steps help you collaborate with someone you dislike?
- How can you set firm boundaries without starting a war?
1. The Reality of Complicated People
Complicated colleagues drain your energy and damage job satisfaction, but the problem is smaller and more manageable than it feels.
You spend 85,000 to 90,000 hours at work throughout your lifetime. Hating the people you work with turns a career into a life sentence.
Ryan Leak and his team conducted a comprehensive national study of 1,000 working Americans aged 18 to 65, weighted to the 2020 U.S. Census. Dealing with complicated people leads to high stress, anger, depression, and even suicidal thoughts for a portion of the workforce. The vast majority of workers report that these interpersonal hurdles erode trust, lower morale, and ruin job satisfaction.
The numbers reveal the heavy toll of difficult workplace interactions:
- 46% of Americans deal with complicated people daily or multiple times a day;
- 78% deal with complicated people at least weekly;
- 77% agree complicated individuals are a serious problem in most work cultures;
- 85% say working effectively with them is important to job success;
- 44% have quit jobs due to complicated bosses;
- 67% report experiencing high levels of stress due to complicated individuals within the last year;
- 18% report clinically diagnosed mental health issues within the last year due to complicated people;
- 11% report suicidal thoughts within the last year due to complicated people;
- 30% rarely or never experience a positive resolution to complicated-people challenges;
- 38% only experience positive outcomes sometimes;
- 31% often or constantly experience a positive outcome.
Complicated individuals also inflict a direct toll on daily morale. 47% of American workers report that complicated individuals very negatively or negatively impact job satisfaction. 41% say they slightly or somewhat negatively impact job satisfaction. 75% of people agree complicated individuals are creating a crisis of stress and frustration.
Yet the scope of the actual burden is surprisingly narrow. 84% of people regularly work with 1 to 5 complicated people. You do not face a sea of hostile coworkers. You deal with a limited group whose negative impact feels outsized.
Improving collaboration with challenging colleagues directly increases personal job satisfaction and removes a primary source of workplace misery. 9 out of 10 people can gain higher job satisfaction by improving collaboration with challenging colleagues.
Ryan Leak spent his early career running between three different part-time jobs in a single shopping mall. He sold running shoes, clothes, and electronics, which introduced him to both retail chaos and diverse human personalities.
True self-awareness begins with the humbling realization that we are all complicated and act as someone else's difficult coworker. People are quick to spot the flaws and irritating quirks of others while remaining blind to their own strange habits and difficult personality traits. 74% of people think they are less complicated to work with than the average person, and 57% of workers have a coworker, manager, or client who constantly needs to be saved from the drama they create.
Accepting that everyone is baffling or frustrating to someone else creates the humility and freedom needed to collaborate effectively. Ryan Leak shares his own quirky idiosyncrasies, including a severe phobia of dogs that forced him to reluctantly pet a dog as an act of love for an ill friend. He also describes an obsession with cleaning that involves vacuuming his floors in front of party guests using a high-tech vacuum.
2. Options and Benefits of Engagement
Avoidance and cancellation fail, while choosing to understand and collaborate brings joy and improves workplace culture.
When dealing with difficult colleagues, you typically choose between four strategies:
- Avoid Them
- Change Them
- Cancel Them
- Understand Them
The first three options are common but ultimately unhealthy and counterproductive. Genuine progress only happens when you choose the fourth option of seeking to understand the other individual.
61% of working Americans are constantly or often avoiding complicated individuals at work. In sports and entertainment, 84% of workers constantly or often avoid complicated individuals, while in communications and media, the number reaches 78%.
Every employee holds the power to improve company morale and workplace culture one positive interaction at a time. Personal actions and attitudes ripple outward through three degrees of connection that define the limit of human social influence according to Christakis and Fowler.
The author spoke to 2500 pharmacists at an American Pharmacists Association event about workplace morale. He suggested breaking the cold routine of asking for birth dates by sincerely asking patients how they were feeling.
You can instantly boost morale with simple actions:
- Go forward six months in your calendar and make a note of employee half-birthdays.
- Send a text or give a cupcake on an employee's half-birthday.
Only 3% of people in a large audience have had their half-birthday celebrated. There is a 97% chance an employee has never worked at an organization that celebrated their half-birthday.
Complicated people bring necessary differences and diverse perspectives that ultimately drive creativity and innovation. Differences in background, personality, and working style can feel prickly and difficult to manage, but they prevent stagnation and serve as the secret sauce to killer creativity. Embracing these friction points allows teams to solve complex problems that no single individual could conquer alone.
3. Mindset Shifts and Expectations
Stop letting people surprise you by adjusting your expectations, overriding your brain's fear triggers, and telling yourself a generous story.
Many people suffer frustration because they hold unspoken expectations and demand superheroic feats from regular human beings. You can go on an expectations detox by aligning expectations with reality and accepting that interactions will not always be smooth.
Baron, a high-powered pharma executive, demanded impossible tasks before nine in the morning and expected superheroic output from his team. After experiencing a team trust fall where his team let him fall close to the ground and laughed, he realized he needed to be more human, lower unrealistic standards, and embrace workplace chaos.
You can shift your daily approach with a few practical adjustments:
- expecting simplicity -> get comfortable with ambiguity;
- wishing everyone else would adjust their behavior -> adjust your expectations;
- getting offended -> get curious;
- resenting hassle and the idiots who cause it -> embrace the messiness inherent in all teamwork and creativity;
- letting people surprise you -> try letting go of your preconceived ideas of what they will do, say, or think.
The brain's top priority is to keep you safe, often misinterpreting difference as danger and catastrophizing worst-case scenarios. The brain uses 20 percent of your body's resources despite accounting for 2 percent of your body's weight. When facing discomfort, uncertainty, or a lack of control, you can recognize these triggers and intentionally engage curiosity instead of yielding to fear.
Improve connections with complicated people by changing the internal narrative through a hypothesis of generosity rather than assuming villainy.
People naturally act as unreliable narrators, casting themselves as heroes while painting difficult colleagues as villains to protect their own self-image. Applying Brené Brown's hypothesis of generosity means jumping to the most generous assumption about someone's intentions rather than defaulting to character judgments or a hypothesis of villainy.
You can reframe common behavioral traits to see colleagues in a clearer light:
- combative -> honest;
- indecisive -> analytical;
- loud -> passionate;
- disorganized -> creative;
- weak -> caring;
- proud -> confident;
- rude -> direct;
- a loner -> lonely;
- old-fashioned -> experienced;
- weird -> brilliant.
While a partnership of carbon copy clones offers friction-free harmony, it results in shared blind spots and mediocrity. Leaders like William Wrigley Jr. understood that employees who always agree are useless.
William Wrigley Jr. moved to Chicago with $32 in 1891, initially selling soap, pivoting to baking soda, and finally launching chewing gum to build a global brand available in 140 countries. Businesses are built by individuals who care enough to disagree and fight for facts rather than seeking comfort in uniformity.
4. The Collaboration Mindset
Approach workplace challenges through a collaboration mindset built on four key elements: self-awareness, ownership, curiosity, and connection.
A mindset is a belief or lens orienting how situations are handled. You can shift from individual struggle to a collaborative collab model akin to artist partnerships. This shift lets you combine different talents to build something unique without losing your core identity.
Rapper Travis Scott and Nike partner to reinvent shoes like Air Force 1 and Air Jordan 1. They blend two distinct creative forces into high-value products neither could create alone.
- SELF-AWARENESS ASKS, What is it like to be on the other side of me?
- OWNERSHIP ASKS, What is my part to play?
- CURIOSITY ASKS, What is it like to be you?
- CONNECTION ASKS, What brings us together?
Self-Awareness and Ownership
Practice self-awareness to understand your impact on others and take ownership of your part in workplace friction.
Self-awareness is the ability to take oneself as the object of attention and distance oneself to know oneself better. Because you are the common denominator in your interactions, taking ownership prevents you from feeling like a helpless prisoner of someone else's choices.
- Ask yourself: What am I responsible for here?
- Ask yourself: Am I managing that responsibility to the best of my ability?
Curiosity and Connection
Use curiosity as a superpower by asking what it is like to be the other person. Asking this question builds a bridge into their world and humanizes them, replacing snap judgments with nuance. As you get to know people better, they become less complicated and easier to value beneath their initial prickliness.
Connection is the vital spark that transforms a group of isolated individuals into an effective, collaborative team. While people often focus entirely on improving individual team members, research proves that the quality of the connections between people is just as important as individual intelligence. Success is driven less by isolated superheroes and more by overall synergy and relationships.
The human brain features 86 billion neurons, yet the brain's network uses less power than a lightbulb.
In 2010, researchers conducted two studies to discover a collective intelligence factor that predicts group performance across tasks. A team's collective intelligence is predicted by social sensitivity and conversational turn-taking rather than the average intelligence of its members. Studies on collective intelligence identified a c factor which correlates primarily with average social sensitivity, equal distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of women on the team due to higher average social sensitivity scores.
According to researchers Derek and Laura Cabrera, companies are complex, adapting systems resembling flocks of birds. People with the most and highest quality relationships hold the most influence in the system. Connection is the currency of the workplace.
5. Navigating via People Qs
To collaborate with complicated individuals, you must apply five People Qs as bridges for connection: IQ, EQ, AQ, TQ, and DQ.
Because people are infinitely complex, relying on rigid personality categorizations is insufficient. You must use quotients representing intelligence, emotional awareness, adaptability, technological skill, and decency to navigate relationships in real time.
- Your IQ Connection
- Your EQ Connection
- Your AQ Connection
- Your TQ Connection
- Your DQ Connection
The IQ connection involves using your knowledge and intelligence to learn other people's languages and build bridges of shared understanding. Ignorance of another person's professional domain undermines connection and credibility. By actively researching unfamiliar fields and valuing different types of intelligences, you can find common ground instead of isolating yourself on a knowledge island.
The author researched hair and makeup terminology like bobs, bangs, and strobing before delivering a keynote address at an industry convention in front of 800 experts in hair and makeup. This followed a US survey where 65% of people agreed they are more intelligent than the average person.
The EQ connection requires identifying and managing emotional states in yourself and others to prevent emotions from driving poor decisions. Emotions provide valuable data about underlying pain, fear, or insecurity, but they should occupy the passenger seat rather than the steering wheel. Handling emotions correctly strengthens relationships instead of blowing them up.
The AQ connection is the ability to adapt to change in real time, pivot quickly, and work flexibly with a wide variety of people. Rigidity and change-aversion create unnecessary friction among CAVE people. Cultivating a high adaptability quotient means keeping your ego in check and adjusting strategies to meet the shifting demands of the workplace.
The TQ connection focuses on leveraging technology thoughtfully as a tool for human communication and collaboration. Effective technology quotient requires bridging gaps with both tech-hesitant colleagues and overly tech-driven individuals without equating technical skill with human value.
- Share a funny meme in the team chat.
- Text people to celebrate their birthdays.
- Praise their accomplishments, or just say hi.
- Post something thought-provoking that your team can see.
- Use social media to get a conversation going.
- Share an interesting article or a relevant podcast.
- Research professional contacts on LinkedIn.
- Use social media to slide (professionally) into someone’s DMs.
The DQ connection anchors all other quotients in decency, kindness, and a genuine commitment to doing right by other people. Decency quotient, highlighted in a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, ensures that intellect and emotional intelligence are used to help society rather than manipulate or tear it down. Long-term studies, such as 14-year research projects at the University of California, Berkeley, show that bullies and deceitful individuals gain no more power than nice, trustworthy people because poor interpersonal relationships offset their advantages. By applying the Golden Rule, you complete the full spectrum of People Qs.
10 Key Ideas
- Dealing with complicated colleagues who drain your energy and damage job satisfaction can be managed because the actual burden involves only a small group of people.
- Choosing to understand and collaborate brings joy and improves workplace culture rather than relying on unhelpful options like avoidance or cancellation.
- You can stop letting people surprise you by adjusting your expectations, overriding your brain's fear triggers, and telling yourself a generous story.
- Shifting your internal narrative through a hypothesis of generosity lets you see challenging colleagues in a clearer light instead of assuming villainy.
- Approaching workplace challenges through a collaboration mindset relies on self-awareness, ownership, curiosity, and connection.
- Practicing self-awareness helps you understand your impact on others and take ownership of your part in workplace friction.
- Using curiosity and connection as a superpower allows you to build bridges into the world of colleagues and humanize them.
- Group performance and collective intelligence are predicted by social sensitivity and conversational turn-taking rather than average individual intelligence.
- You must apply the five People Qs—IQ, EQ, AQ, TQ, and DQ—as bridges for connection to navigate the complexities of working with others.
- The decency quotient anchors all other quotients in kindness and ensures that intellect and emotional intelligence are used to do right by people.