How to Lead Someone You Don't Like

Sooner or later you will manage someone whose company you do not enjoy. Not someone who performs badly, which is a separate problem with a separate solution. Someone who does the job adequately or well, and whom you would not choose to spend time with, and whose presence in your week produces a small internal resistance you would rather not admit to having.

Most guidance on this subject begins by suggesting you examine whether the dislike is fair. That is a reasonable first step and it is not the whole of the work, because the honest answer is frequently that the dislike is partly fair and partly not, and the mixture does not resolve into a clean instruction. What follows assumes you have done that examination, found it inconclusive, and still have to manage the person on Monday.

What the dislike actually costs her

Start with consequences rather than with feelings, because the feelings are not the problem and the consequences are.

A manager who does not enjoy someone gives her less time. This happens without decision. The check-in runs shorter, the follow-up email is briefer, the question gets answered rather than explored. Over a year this amounts to a substantial difference in development, and the person on the receiving end experiences it as being less supported without being able to identify why.

She also receives less information. Managers share context more freely with people they like, which means the disliked employee operates with a thinner picture of what is happening and makes worse decisions as a result. Those decisions then confirm the manager's assessment, which is a closed loop that feels like evidence and is actually a consequence of the manager's own behavior.

And she is evaluated differently. The research on performance evaluation is consistent that affect contaminates assessment, particularly for subjective criteria, and particularly in the direction of finding evidence for a conclusion already reached. A manager who dislikes someone will notice her errors more readily and her contributions less readily, and will describe the same behavior in less generous language than she would use for someone else.

None of this requires bad intent. All of it is happening in most organizations right now, and it is one of the more reliable mechanisms by which people get quietly stalled without ever being told anything is wrong.

Separate the information from the reaction

Dislike sometimes carries real information and sometimes carries none, and the useful move is to determine which before deciding what to do.

Ask what specifically produces the reaction. If the answer is a behavior with a professional consequence, meaning she takes credit that is not hers, or she is dismissive of junior colleagues, or she commits to things and does not deliver, then the dislike is downstream of a performance issue and you have a management conversation to have. The discomfort was information and you should act on it.

If the answer is style, manner, communication preference, pace, or something you cannot name precisely, the dislike is not carrying information about her work. That does not make it illegitimate as a feeling. It makes it irrelevant as a basis for decisions, and it means your task is to prevent it from affecting how you manage her.

The third possibility is worth naming because it is common and uncomfortable. Sometimes the reaction is about you, meaning she reminds you of someone, or she has a quality you find threatening, or she does something you wish you did. This category is the most likely to produce unfair treatment precisely because it is the least examined.

What to do about it structurally

Feeling differently is not available on demand, so the practical approach is to constrain how the feeling can act rather than to attempt to eliminate it.

Standardize the things that drift. Give her the same meeting length you give others, on the same cadence, and hold it rather than letting it slip. Drift is where most of the damage happens and it is entirely correctable by putting the structure in a calendar rather than relying on inclination.

Write your evaluation of her work before you write anyone else's, and write it against specific evidence rather than against impression. Then read it and ask whether a colleague who liked her would describe the same conduct in the same terms. This exercise catches a surprising amount, because the contamination usually appears in adjectives rather than in facts.

Deliberately transmit information you would otherwise not think to share. The context about why a decision was made, the thing you heard about next quarter, the reason a project was shaped a particular way. Ask yourself weekly what you have told your favorite report that you have not told her, and then tell her.

And give her the good assignments on the same basis you give them to anyone. Opportunity allocation is where dislike does its most lasting damage, because a person can recover from a poor review and cannot recover from three years of not being given anything visible.

The conversation worth having

There is an intervention available that most managers skip, which is asking her directly how the working relationship is going for her.

This is uncomfortable and it produces information you cannot get any other way. Frequently she already knows something is off, because people almost always know, and she has been interpreting it in some way that may or may not be accurate. Occasionally the conversation surfaces a specific misunderstanding that resolves in ten minutes, which is a good outcome and worth the discomfort to get to.

It also changes the relationship mechanically. It is considerably harder to avoid someone you have had a direct conversation with about how you are working together, and the difficulty is useful, because avoidance is the mechanism through which most of this operates.

Do not use the conversation to disclose your feelings. She does not need to know you find her difficult and telling her produces nothing except an injury she now has to manage. Ask about her experience, listen to what she says, and act on any of it that is actionable.

When the dislike is mutual

Sometimes she does not like you either, and this is the version that requires the most care because two people managing a reaction produces more distortion than one.

The thing to protect here is her access to the organization rather than the relationship itself. Make sure she has a working relationship with someone senior who is not you, whether a peer of yours, a mentor elsewhere in the company, or a project sponsor. A person whose only senior relationship is with someone who does not like her is in a structurally precarious position regardless of her performance, and correcting that is within your power and costs you nothing.

It is also worth asking honestly whether she should report to you at all. A reassignment is sometimes the right answer and it is under-used, because managers experience it as an admission of failure. It is not. Some pairings do not work, the mismatch is not always anyone's fault, and a competent person performing poorly under one manager and well under another is an extremely common pattern.

The standard

The version of this that gets recommended most often is to find something to appreciate about her, and I think that advice is weaker than it sounds. It aims at changing a feeling, which is unreliable, and it can produce a manager who has convinced herself she is being fair while continuing to behave exactly as before.

The more durable standard is behavioral and checkable. Would an observer watching how you manage her be able to tell that you do not like her? If the answer is yes, that is the problem to fix, and it is fixable through the specific structural changes above rather than through an adjustment in your internal state.

You do not owe her your affection. You owe her the same access to your time, your information, your opportunities, and your honest assessment that you give to everyone else. That is the whole obligation, and it is entirely possible to meet it while continuing to wish she worked somewhere else.