Tell me about a time you worked with someone difficult.

On a school consulting project sophomore year, our team had five members, and one — I'll call him D — had a habit of disengaging for two weeks and then trying to drive the final deliverable in the last 48 hours. The first round, our team avoided the conflict by working around him. The deliverable was fine, but it was clear the dynamic was going to break the second project.

I was the unofficial lead. I asked D to grab coffee — not to talk about the project, just to get a read on what was going on. He told me, without me prompting, that he was carrying 21 credits and a part-time job, and the project felt like the lowest-stakes commitment in his week. That reframed it for me: he wasn't difficult, he was overloaded and signaling badly.

What I did next was structural. I rebuilt the project plan around two-week sprint deliverables with an explicit owner per sprint. I gave D the sprint that was most self-contained — the secondary research synthesis — and the deadline was a real one because the primary research interviews depended on it. He delivered, on time, and the quality was solid. The deeper issue is that he needed external structure to make the commitment legible against his other obligations.

The lesson — and the reason I tell this story specifically — is that "difficult" is usually a description of a system, not a person. I was tempted to just exclude him from key decisions and route around him. The intervention that actually worked was making the structure tighter so his contribution had a clear shape. I've tried to apply that frame ever since, including with peers I personally find frustrating.