I Was the Difficult Colleague and Nobody Told Me

I had been at the digital agency in London for three years when the company introduced a 360-degree feedback process - the kind where peers, direct reports and managers all submit anonymous assessments that are then compiled into a report. I went into it without much concern.

I was reasonably well-liked, I thought, delivered good work, and had no particular awareness of any significant interpersonal issue that needed addressing. The report that arrived was one of the more uncomfortable documents I have read about myself.

The pattern that emerged across multiple respondents was consistent: I was described as someone who did good individual work but who was difficult to collaborate with - specifically that I had a tendency to dismiss ideas in group settings before they had been fully explored, that I was impatient with people whose pace or process differed from mine, and that junior members of the team found me intimidating in a way that made them reluctant to share work in progress with me.

Each of these things, reading them alone in the room where my manager had left me to process the report, was simultaneously deniable and recognisable. I could construct a counter-argument for each. I could also, if I was honest, locate the behaviour in specific recent memories. I did not react well initially.

I spent two weeks being quietly defensive, looking for the flaws in the process and in the people who had contributed to it. What shifted that defensiveness was a conversation with a friend who had known me for ten years and who, when I described the feedback with the expectation of validation, said instead that she could see what the people were describing.

That she had experienced versions of the same thing. The specific pain of hearing it from a friend was different from hearing it from anonymous colleagues - it was harder to dismiss and therefore harder to stay defended against. The change was not overnight.

Learning to slow down in collaborative settings, to let ideas develop before evaluating them, to notice the difference between my impatience and the pace of the room - these were skills I had to practice consciously and incorrectly many times before they started to come more naturally.

Two years on I lead a team and the thing I am most deliberate about is creating the kind of safety in which people bring things before they are ready. I did not know I was preventing that. I do now.