When a Colleague Makes Work Harder — Meredith Fuller on Office Conflict

Meredith Fuller’s workplace guide looks at what happens when another person’s behaviour makes it hard to do your job.

The English-language edition appeared under the deliberately abrasive title Working with Bitches. The Korean title puts the emphasis on psychology. Fuller’s subject is the conduct someone may encounter at work and the options they have in response.

Eight Patterns of Behaviour

The first part identifies eight patterns and gives examples of what they look like in an office. Fuller also considers what a person might be trying to achieve by acting that way.

The Eight Types in the Book

1. The colleague who excludes people
2. The insecure colleague
3. The colleague who undermines others quietly
4. The colleague who expects special treatment
5. The colleague who shouts
6. The colleague who lies
7. The colleague who cannot do the work they have been assigned
8. The colleague whose behaviour gets misread

The categories are Fuller’s way of organising her examples. They are useful when they help name something specific that happened and leave room to decide what to do next.

She gives concrete advice for dealing with a person who undermines colleagues quietly.

When Someone Tries to Undermine You

• Keep interactions professional. Reduce unnecessary contact if the work allows it.
• Be careful with information you would not want repeated.
• Make sure the people you work with know how you do your job and what you deliver. That gives them more than one account of your work to go on.

What Else Might Be Going On?

The second part reaches for a wider explanation and draws on Carl Jung’s ideas of the anima and animus. These ideas belong to a particular tradition in psychology. Fuller uses them to interpret some of the patterns she describes.

The book also offers four archetypes as ways of thinking about how someone presents herself:

1. Mother
2. Companion
3. Amazon
4. Medium

Thinking and Feeling in a Disagreement

The book distinguishes people who give more weight to impersonal reasons from people who give more weight to values and relationships. It has a questionnaire that put me closer to the feeling side when I tried it.

A clash between those approaches can make someone sound harsher than they intend. That is a useful distinction to make before deciding that an awkward exchange was meant as an attack.

Differences of Generation

People who arrived at a workplace at different times may have learned different rules about what a colleague owes them or what it means to be direct. Those differences can colour an encounter before anyone has done anything malicious.

Getting through a Difficult Period at Work

The last part considers how to handle the strain of working alongside someone whose behaviour repeatedly affects you.

Why Recovery Can Take Time

Strain that has built up over months can take time to ease. A new job may remove a particular source of it. It can also mean learning another set of relationships while you are still tired.

Fuller suggests making room to recover before taking on another demanding situation when that is possible.

Keeping the Rest of Life in View

The book considers exercise and outside interests as ways to keep work from occupying all of the available space in the day.

It closes with answers to questions Fuller often hears.

You can come to work to do a job and spend more energy managing a relationship than you meant to. The book is worth opening when you want to describe what happened more precisely and think through how you might respond.

Book Information

Working with Bitches

Author

Meredith Fuller

Publication

17 June 2013 (Korean edition)

ISBN

9788997449545

View the book at Kyobo

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