Working with a colleague you did not choose and do not much like

Most friction is about position, not personality

When two colleagues keep clashing, the explanation reached for is temperament. Often the real cause is that they are being measured on different things. Someone judged on delivery speed and someone judged on the absence of errors will disagree constantly, and both will be behaving correctly according to what their manager will ask them about. Neither is difficult; the organisation has pointed them in different directions and then expected them to agree.

It is worth testing that explanation before settling on a personal one, because the two lead to completely different responses. If the cause is incentives, the useful move is to surface the trade-off and get it decided by someone with the authority to do so, which relieves both of you. If you treat it as a personality clash, you will manage the atmosphere while the underlying conflict regenerates every month.

Reduce the ambiguity before you address the relationship

A large share of peer conflict lives in undefined boundaries: two people who both think they own a decision, or neither of whom does, or who have different beliefs about what was agreed. Ambiguity converts into irritation quickly, and the irritation then gets attributed to the other person.

Writing things down helps far more than it should. A short note after a conversation, saying what was agreed and who does what, resolves a surprising proportion of recurring disputes, because it turns out the two of you had different recollections rather than different intentions. Do it as ordinary practice rather than as a response to a problem, since introducing it mid-conflict looks like building a case, which is a different act with a different effect.

You don’t have to like them

The standard being aimed at is workable, not warm. It is entirely possible to work well for years with someone whose company you would not choose, and treating personal warmth as a prerequisite creates a problem that need not exist. What is required is that information flows both ways, that commitments are kept, and that neither of you is surprised in front of other people.

That last one carries more weight than the rest combined. Raising a problem with someone’s work publicly, without having told them first, does damage that takes a long time to repair, and it is the most common way a difficult working relationship becomes an unworkable one. The corresponding discipline is to tell them first, even when they have not extended you the same courtesy, because the alternative is a spiral that both of you will lose.

When it’s genuinely the person

Sometimes it is. Some colleagues take credit that isn’t theirs, withhold information to preserve an advantage, or are unpleasant in ways that have nothing to do with structure. Pretending this is always a misunderstanding is one of the less useful pieces of workplace advice in circulation.

The practical response is limited and worth knowing in advance. Reduce dependency where you can, so that your work does not sit downstream of their goodwill. Keep exchanges in writing, without announcing that you are doing so. Be scrupulously accurate in what you say about them, because in a dispute the person who exaggerated loses the advantage even when they were originally right. And raise it with your manager as a description of concrete effects on the work — this deadline moved for this reason — rather than as a characterisation, since characterisations are easy to file under personality clash and forget.

Where behaviour crosses into harassment, discrimination or anything covered by policy or law, that is a different situation and should not be handled as a working-relationship problem. Find out what formal routes exist, record specifics with dates, and get proper advice rather than trying to manage it personally.

The limits of what you can fix

You control your half. That is not a platitude so much as a boundary: you can be reliable, unambiguous and fair in what you say about them, and you can decline to escalate the tone. You cannot make somebody else reasonable, and a great deal of energy is spent by people trying.

If the relationship is central to your work and cannot be made workable, that is a management problem and should be handed over as one, with specifics. Whether it gets addressed is a fair test of the organisation. Some will restructure the work sensibly; others will tell both of you to sort it out, which in practice means whoever is more willing to absorb the cost will do so. Knowing which kind of place you are in is worth more than another attempt at the same conversation.