Why Is Everyone So Difficult?

Shaping Your Team

Why Is Everyone
So Difficult?

The behaviour you find most frustrating in your team is usually a response to conditions you set, not a fact about who they are.

A short guide to one idea that changes how you lead: most of what looks like a people problem is a conditions problem. Read it in about fifteen minutes, work the reflections against a real situation on your own team, and save it to PDF to keep. For any leader who has looked at someone and thought, why are they like this?

This guide is interactive. Type your reflections directly into the fields as you go. Responses save automatically and appear when you print or save as PDF.

Someone capable has become difficult and you can't work out why

A reorg, merger or growth spurt has changed how people behave

You keep having the same frustration with the same person

You want to lead in a way that blames less and changes more

Part One

Much of what feels personal isn't

The first thing to question is the story you're telling about the person.

Before you decide the problem is the person, look at where they are standing.

We explain behaviour by character. He's defensive. She's territorial. They don't take initiative. It feels obvious, because it feels like who they are. So that's where we aim the fix - a conversation, some feedback, a development plan, a quiet word.

But watch what happens when the position changes. The reliable performer who turns guarded after a reorg. The open collaborator who gets territorial once the new structure puts two of them in competition for the same ground. The thoughtful manager who starts to look indecisive the moment they're caught between a demanding boss and a frustrated team. Same person. Different position. Different behaviour.

Much that seems personal is not personal. — Barry Oshry

The behaviour didn't come from nowhere, and it didn't come from their character. It came from the conditions they found themselves in. Which means the story you're telling about the person - the one that feels so obviously true - is often the least useful place to start.

Part One — Reflection

Think of someone on your team whose behaviour frustrates you. Write down the story you tell yourself about why they're like that.

Now describe the position they sit in - the pressures on them, what's asked of them, how visible they are, what they actually control.

How much of the behaviour could be a response to that position, rather than a fact about their character?

Part Two

Top, middle, bottom

Three places people stand, and the pull each one produces.

Put the same kind, capable people into different positions, and predictable things happen.

For any given piece of work, people end up in one of three positions relative to it. Each position comes with its own pull - a force that acts on whoever is standing there, almost regardless of who they are.

The Top Overwhelm

Carries responsibility they keep absorbing. Too much lands on them, it all seems to depend on them, and there's no room to think. The pull is to take on more and hold it tighter.

The Middle Squeeze

Pulled both ways at once, trying to satisfy the top and the bottom and tearing in two. Loyal to everyone, belonging nowhere. The pull is to absorb the tension and please both sides.

The Bottom Disregard

On the receiving end of decisions made elsewhere. Unseen, done-to, shut out of choices that affect them. The pull is to withdraw, or to turn on each other.

The position produces the pull. Whoever stands there will feel it.

None of this is about competence. Move a calm, capable person into the squeeze and they start to look indecisive. Put a generous one at an overwhelmed top and they start to look controlling. Leave a committed one at a disregarded bottom and they start to look disengaged. The behaviour is the position talking.

Part Two — Reflection

Pick one live situation. Where are your tops, middles and bottoms in it? (It shifts by issue, so choose one.)

Which position is the person from Part One standing in?

What pull are they under - overwhelm, squeeze, or disregard? Does the behaviour start to make more sense in that light?

Part Three

You run the conditions

The part that's actually yours to change.

You don't run a simulation. But you do run the conditions.

How your meetings work. Who gets heard and who gets talked over. What gets rewarded, and what gets someone quietly sidelined. What happens when a person brings you a problem. The behaviour you find most frustrating in your team is, in large part, a response to all of that.

Which is why the instinct to fix the person so often fails. The person is the hardest thing to change, and the least within your control. The conditions are yours.

Change the conditions and you're not fixing anyone. You're making room for a different set of behaviours to show up.

It's also the kinder way to lead. Once you see behaviour as a response to conditions, you stop reading it as character. You take it less personally, and so does everyone else. The team stops asking who to blame and starts asking what to change.

Part Three — The self-check

Take the behaviour you named in Part One. What condition that you control might be producing it - a meeting that doesn't let them speak, a reward pulling the wrong way, a response they've learned to expect from you?

What is one condition you could change this month?

If you changed it, what different behaviour would you be making room for?

The most vivid way to see all of this is to watch a whole team live it at once, in a room, in real time - their own organisation playing out in front of them. But you don't need the room to start. You need to look at the conditions you're setting, and change the one producing the behaviour you keep trying to fix. If you'd like your team to see it for themselves, that's what the Organisation Workshop is for.

Dustin Woods

I've spent 25 years inside organisations across the Middle East, Asia and Africa - watching what makes working life harder than it needs to be, and what actually helps. These guides are my attempt to put that into something useful.

If this one was useful, there are more guides at growth-edge.co/guides - covering leadership transitions, team dynamics, and the challenges that don't usually make it into job descriptions.

You can also find writing and observations at growth-edge.co/insights.

If any of this is familiar, I'm at dustin@growth-edge.co.

Dustin Woods

More guides at growth-edge.co/guides · Writing at growth-edge.co/insights · dustin@growth-edge.co