A Coworker You Clash With and Cannot Avoid: Where to Start

There is a category of professional difficulty for which almost all the available advice is unsuitable: advice about hierarchical relationships assumes authority, advice about management assumes a role, and advice about private life assumes you can move away. Between colleagues, none of the three conditions holds.

What remains available is narrower, but real: the way the work is organised between you, the way you word things, the channel you use, what you keep, and the moment you bring in a third party. Five levers. In most cases they are enough.

The preliminary move: describe instead of characterise

Here are two ways of saying the same situation.

"He's underhand, he does everything he can to put me in a difficult position."

"On the last four shared files, information about deadline changes reached me through the client and not through him. Three times out of four, I discovered the change in a meeting."

The first sentence may well be true. Above all it is unusable: it cannot be dated, it cannot be verified, it cannot be taken to anyone — not to a manager, not to HR, not to an employee representative, all of whom will ask you the same thing: what happened, and on what day. And if you say it out loud, it is you that it puts in difficulty: it will be heard as a judgement about a person, and the conversation will be about that judgement rather than about the situation.

The second sentence says nothing about what the other person is. It describes what happens and what it costs. It can be corrected if a date is wrong, and it calls for an answer about how the work is organised.

This is not a matter of politeness: it is a matter of effectiveness. A behaviour gets recorded; a personality gets argued about indefinitely.

The description grid, in four columns

This grid has a property that lists of grievances do not: it makes regularity visible, and regularity is the only genuinely demonstrative element. An isolated episode can always be explained away — workload, an oversight, a bad day. A dated series cannot.

This is exactly the kind of sequencing that ScanMyJob produces from professional exchanges: the channels used, the density, the thread exits, the timings. The team conflict case shown as an example shows what thirteen weeks of exchanges between seven people look like when viewed that way — and how far that differs from what memory retained.

What is actually at stake, in three frames

Reciprocity, and what happens when it breaks

Work on social exchange describes the peer relationship as a set of contributions that are not accounted for but are tracked: you do a favour, you pass something on, you cover an absence, without anything being written down — and the relationship holds as long as the flow is perceived as roughly balanced.

What degrades it is almost never an event; it is an asymmetry that settles in: information travels in one direction, so does helping out, and the trade-offs always fall on the same side. Nobody is counting, and yet everybody knows.

The practical value of this frame is that it shifts the question. Instead of "why does he behave like that", it offers: what, in the way we work together, has become unbalanced, and since when? The second question has answers.

Incivility: what costs through accumulation

Research on workplace incivility — low-intensity behaviours, ambiguous as to intent: not replying, interrupting, ignoring a greeting, making a remark in front of others — has established a counter-intuitive result. Taken in isolation, these minor episodes never justify raising them; cumulatively, their measured effects on concentration, satisfaction and intention to leave are comparable to those of far more serious events.

That explains two things many people experience. First, why you feel exhausted by things you cannot recount without sounding as though you are complaining about nothing. Second, why keeping the grid matters so much: it is the only way to make visible what each isolated episode makes invisible.

Ostracism: the effect of what is not done

A third mechanism, harder still to describe, is that of absence: not being informed, not being invited, not receiving a reply, not being credited. Work on workplace ostracism shows that it is tolerated worse than open hostility, for a precise reason: it offers no purchase. You cannot respond to something that did not happen, and whoever complains about it comes across as touchy.

Here again, the only workable response is the record: the meetings whose invitation never arrived, the threads you are not copied into although the subject concerns you, response times compared. Those are facts, and they can be counted.

The five levers available between peers

1. The organisation of the work

This is the most effective lever and the least used, because it does not go through the relationship. A large share of lateral tensions come from overlapping areas that were never settled: who answers the client, who signs off, who is informed, in what order.

Asking for clarification — if need be by taking it to the manager as a question of organisation and not as a dispute — resolves far more situations than a conversation about respect. And it has a second effect: it removes the ground the conflict was standing on.

2. The wording

In the moment, two or three simple formulations are enough to avoid letting something pass without inflaming it. They are the subject of a separate article, because this is the most technical and the most decisive point.

One general rule, however: respond to the fact, never to the presumed intent. "The information did not reach me" is unanswerable; "you deliberately didn't warn me" opens a debate nobody can win.

3. The channel

The chosen channel produces a large part of what we attribute to people. A disagreement handled in a thread of eight people becomes a public demonstration; the same disagreement handled directly is often settled in three sentences.

Two concrete moves: systematically leave the group thread to handle what concerns two people, and confirm in writing what was said orally — not in order to catch anyone out, but because it is the only way to have a shared reference point.

4. The record

Keeping a record is not building a case against someone. It is not depending, six months from now, on a memory that will have erased three quarters of it and distorted the rest. The four-column grid is enough, and it serves you first of all: it lets you check whether what you feel corresponds to a real regularity, or to three episodes clustered in a busy period.

What the record must never contain: attributed intent, characterisation, or any adjective about the person. Those are the three things that make it unusable and that turn against whoever wrote it.

5. The third party

The manager first — and not to arbitrate a relational dispute, but to settle what falls within their role: remits, priorities, circuits. That is a step that has to be prepared.

Then, depending on the case, HR, employee representatives, or a mediator. Each can do different things, and the order in which you approach them matters.

The criterion that justifies escalating

It is neither intensity nor how long it has gone on. It rests on three cumulative elements:

• regularity — the same behaviour, with you, over several months, documented;
• effect on the work — something cannot be done, or has to be redone;
• the failure of the direct levers — you have attempted at least one direct clarification, and you can say when.

Without these three elements, a report arrives too early and rebounds. With them, it is admissible, whatever your listener's personal sympathies.

There is a fourth situation, which is beyond the scope of this article: when what is happening lastingly changes your sleep, your appetite or your ability to recover. That is then a health matter, and an occupational health doctor can be seen without going through the employer and is bound by medical confidentiality. Some situations also fall under a specific legal regime; characterising them belongs neither to this article nor to you, but to a court, and it is prepared with an employee representative or a lawyer.

To take stock of what the situation is costing you today, the tests on the platform are available, and the assistant can help you put a factual description into shape before a meeting.

Three things this article does not do

It does not say who is right. The description grid works independently of where the fault lies — including when you have a share in what has become established, which is common and hard to see from the inside. It does not describe anyone. None of the mechanisms mentioned says what someone is. Broken reciprocity, a series of incivilities, being sidelined: these are dynamics, and a dynamic can be changed — a presumed character cannot. It characterises nothing. Neither legally nor clinically. It describes behaviours, their effects, and the levers available.