How to Deal With Difficult People

A hotel night manager has dealt with more difficult people between midnight and six than most of us meet in a decade, and she has arrived at an unglamorous conclusion: almost nobody is difficult in general. They are difficult in a situation, and if you can identify which situation you are in, the correct response is usually obvious. Her taxonomy has four entries, and she says the mistake nearly everyone makes is applying the response for one to another.

The first is the frightened person wearing anger as a coat. A missed connection, a lost passport, a bill they cannot pay. They arrive shouting, but the shouting is structural, not personal; it is what fear sounds like when it has to be spoken in public. The response is not calm reason, which reads as coldness, but speed and specificity. Tell them exactly what will happen next and when. Fear collapses the moment the future acquires a shape.

The second is the person who has not been heard, sometimes for hours, sometimes for years. They repeat themselves, escalate, restate the grievance from the beginning each time you offer a solution. Offering a better solution makes it worse, because they are not yet in the market for solutions. She says the only thing that works is to say the complaint back to them, accurately, including the part that makes your organisation look bad. Once a person hears their own case in someone else's mouth, they generally stop making it.

The third is the person who is difficult because it works. They have learned that a certain volume produces upgrades. This one is not solved by empathy, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's night. The response is warm, unmoved repetition of the boundary — the same sentence, no new arguments, no visible irritation. Arguments give them material. Repetition gives them nothing, and they leave to find a softer target, usually within four minutes.

The fourth is the one people least want to hear about, which is the person who is difficult because you are being difficult and have not noticed. She includes herself in this. Tiredness makes her clipped; being right makes her worse. Her private test is whether she is trying to resolve the situation or trying to win it, and she says the tell is the desire to say something clever. If a good line is forming in your mouth, you have stopped solving the problem.

Underneath all four sits one rule she offers to new staff on their first night, and it is not about kindness. Do not accept the invitation to have the same feeling. Difficult behaviour is contagious because it is an offer: the other person is proposing a scene, with parts allocated, and if you accept your part the scene must run to its end. Declining is not passivity and it is not letting people walk over you. It is simply refusing to be cast, which leaves the other person holding a script that no longer works — and very often, an hour later, apologising at the desk.