Reading · Abby Medcalf, PhD

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You didn’t hire them and you didn’t choose them. In some cases, you wouldn’t have them over for dinner if your life depended on it. And yet here you are, expected to collaborate, coordinate, and produce results together five days a week.

Working with people you genuinely don’t like is one of the most universal and least discussed workplace experiences. Today, I’m going to tell you what’s actually happening neurologically when certain personalities set off your threat response, why the “just be professional” advice falls so flat, and what actually works when you’re stuck with a team you’d never have assembled yourself.

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7-minute read

Why Do Some People Just Bother You So Much?

When a particular colleague reliably irritates, drains, or sets you on edge, your nervous system is responding to something real; it’s just not always what you think it is. Research in neuroscience and social cognition shows that we have automatic threat responses to certain personality characteristics, communication styles, and behavioral patterns that clash with our own.

These responses evolved as a social survival mechanism. In ancestral environments, people whose values, signals, and behaviors were too different from the group represented genuine risk. Your amygdala still fires the same way today when someone’s working style, communication approach, or interpersonal manner registers as “not like me,” even when the stakes are a project deadline rather than physical survival.

The people who bother you most at work tend to fall into a few categories. Some embody the opposite of your own highest values. So, if you’re deeply conscientious, a colleague who’s sloppy and cavalier will activate a moral disgust response that feels disproportionate to the actual harm they’re causing. If you value directness, someone who communicates in circles will feel almost physically uncomfortable to interact with. If you’re collaborative by nature, a fiercely competitive colleague can feel like a fundamental threat to the way you believe work should be done.

Others bother you because they remind you of something in yourself you’d rather not see. This one’s harder to sit with, but it’s worth naming. The colleague whose self-promotion makes you cringe might be activating discomfort about your own ambition. The one whose emotional expressiveness irritates you might be reflecting something you’ve been trained to keep contained. This isn’t always the case, but it’s worth taking a moment for some self-reflection.

The distinction matters because the approach is different.

Why Does “Just Be Professional” Not Work?

Because it asks you to override a physiological response with a behavioral instruction, and that’s not how nervous systems work.

“Just be professional” means: don’t let your reaction show, be pleasant in meetings, do the work. It’s not bad advice exactly, but it addresses the output without addressing the input. If every interaction with a particular colleague activates your threat response, you’re spending a significant amount of cognitive and emotional energy managing that response while simultaneously trying to do your job. That’s expensive. Over time, it contributes to exactly the kind of low-grade depletion that leads to burnout.

The reason it doesn’t work is the same reason willpower doesn’t fix perfectionism or people-pleasing: you’re trying to manage a nervous system response with conscious intention, and the nervous system is faster and stronger than your intentions. What actually works goes a level deeper.

Four Things that Actually Work When You Don’t Like Your Team

There are four things that actually work when you don’t like your team, and they work at different levels of the problem.

1. Get Curious

The first is getting curious about the trigger rather than just managing it. When a colleague reliably activates your threat response, the useful question isn’t “how do I stop reacting” but “what specifically is triggering this, and what does that tell me?” Sometimes the answer reveals a genuine values conflict worth naming. Sometimes it reveals something about your own sensitivities that you can work with directly. Sometimes it reveals that you’ve been telling yourself a story about this person that’s gotten more elaborate than the original facts warrant. All three of those are more useful than white-knuckling your way through every interaction.

2. Reduce the Stakes

The second is reducing the stakes you’ve assigned to the relationship. One of the things that makes difficult team dynamics so exhausting is the way we unconsciously treat every interaction as a test of the whole relationship. When you dread seeing someone, even a neutral exchange can feel loaded. What helps is consciously narrowing the scope: what do I actually need from this person to do my work? In most cases, it’s something fairly specific like their input on a project, their cooperation on a process, or their presence in a meeting. You’re not trying to like them. You’re trying to achieve a limited, specific thing with them. That reframe significantly reduces the cognitive and emotional load of each interaction.

3. Find the One Thing

The third is finding the one thing. Research on perspective-taking and empathy activation shows that it’s very difficult to maintain a strong negative reaction to someone once you’ve genuinely understood one thing about them that makes their behavior make sense. Not agree with it. Not excuse it. Understand it. Every person you work with has a history, a set of pressures, a nervous system doing its best with what it has. Finding the one thing, the context that makes their annoying behavior at least comprehensible, doesn’t mean you have to like them. It just lowers the temperature enough to make the relationship workable.

4. Check Yourself

The fourth is managing your own nervous system state before and during difficult interactions. If you walk into a meeting with someone who reliably sets you off already in a low-grade threat state, the interaction is going to go worse than it would if you’d regulated first. This is where mindfulness earns its keep in a very practical way; not as a philosophical or spiritual practice but as a physiological tool. You’re rarely going to get through an episode with me without me mentioning it, and this is one of the clearest applications I can point to.

Grab the free Mindfulness Starter Kit at abbymedcalf.com and start building the regulation capacity that makes these interactions genuinely easier.

When Is It Worth Addressing Directly?

Not every difficult team dynamic needs a conversation. Some personality mismatches are just facts of working life, and the most useful response is the internal work above rather than an external one.

But direct conversation is worth having when the dynamic is actively affecting the quality of the work, when the other person’s behavior is crossing clear professional lines, or when you’ve been managing your reaction for so long that the resentment is starting to leak through anyway. At that point, the choice isn’t between having a difficult conversation and maintaining peace. It’s between having the conversation intentionally and having it accidentally when your patience runs out.

The approach from Episode 29 on peer conflict applies here: specific observation, framing around the work rather than the relationship, and a concrete ask. “I want to talk about something because I think it’ll help us work together more effectively” is a much better entry point than anything that starts with “the problem with you is.”

To be effective, start with the relationship, not the grievance or issue.

There’s also a version of this that’s about structure rather than conversation. If the difficulty is fundamentally about role overlap, communication style mismatch, or unclear expectations, sometimes the most effective intervention is a structural one, such as clearer agreements about who owns what, a communication norm the team explicitly adopts, or a process change that reduces the number of friction points. As an organizational psychologist and consultant with more than 35 years inside organizations, I’ve seen more difficult team dynamics resolved by structural clarity than by interpersonal processing. Sometimes the relationship isn’t the problem; the setup or system is.

What’s the Bottom Line on Working with People You’d Never Choose?

You didn’t choose your team and you can’t always change it. But you can change your relationship to it. The four-part approach: getting curious about the trigger, reducing the stakes you’ve assigned to each interaction, finding the one thing that makes their behavior comprehensible, and managing your own nervous system state, addresses the dynamic at the level where it actually lives rather than at the level of behavior management alone. You’re probably not going to end up liking everyone you work with. But you can stop letting the people you don’t like have more power over your experience at work than they deserve.

Putting Today’s Lesson into Action

To put today’s lesson into action, you can grab the free Team Friction Decoder, your one-page tool for identifying what’s actually driving the difficult dynamic and where to focus your energy.

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