Hard to work with
&gt; What I’ve found effective in these cases is to lead with constructive energy directed towards a positive outcome. Even if you can’t get your peer’s performance addressed directly, you can often overcome your peer’s bad performance by generating excitement in the direction you want to go. Enough excitement will give the resolution avoidant manager a way to solve their problem without actually engaging with the situation that they’re unwilling to address.<p>The author arrives at a valuable conclusion in a somewhat roundabout way: The real solution to most problems, including low performing peers, is to step up and lead with a positive example.<p>Years ago I would have agreed that the authors&#x27; dismissal of &quot;hard to work with&quot; is unfair and inaccurate. None of us wants to believe that <i>we</i> are the one who is hard to work with. Everybody else is wrong! I&#x27;m not the problem, it&#x27;s my coworkers who aren&#x27;t doing exactly what I want them to do!<p>Yet as a manager, I&#x27;ve learned that the realities of hiring and managing people are very different than my overly idealistic standards when I was a junior IC. In retrospect, my ideas that it was my manager&#x27;s job to ruthlessly punish or remove anyone I didn&#x27;t feel was performing up to par or that I shouldn&#x27;t be forced to navigate difficult social situations were unreasonable.<p>&gt; It’s a truism that you always want to hire folks with very high standards, but I’ve seen a staggering number of folks fail in an organization primarily because they want to hold others to a higher standard than their organization’s management is willing to enforce.<p>Having high aspirations for yourself is great. Helping raise the bar through leading by example and mentoring your peers is great.<p>Running to your manager every time you feel dissatisfied with someone else&#x27;s performance and arriving with only complaints is, however, not great.<p>No team is perfect. Hiring is hard. Nobody starts out as a superstar. People learn and grow at different rates. If you want to contribute, lead by example and help people out when they fall behind. As a manager I&#x27;m actually well aware of who&#x27;s delivering and who&#x27;s struggling, but we don&#x27;t fire people the second they fall behind. We also notice who&#x27;s helping the team reach the next level and who&#x27;s simply in it for themselves.<p>If your only solution to every problem is to run to your manager and demand that they <i>do something</i> because a peer didn&#x27;t do exactly what you wanted or expected, I&#x27;m first going to ask what you did to help move the situation forward on your own. The first question is usually &quot;How did it go when you talked to them about?&quot; The first answer of the difficult to work with people is &quot;Well... I didn&#x27;t talk to them about it&quot;.