Emotional Intelligence, Trust, and Dealing with Difficult People
We've covered a lot of ground. Five traits, each with its own sub-facets, its own environmental preferences, its own patterns of influence and vulnerability. By now, you should be starting to look at the people around you differently, noticing not just what they do, but why, and what that tells you about who they are.
In this post, we will add in a few more pieces. We will discuss emotional intelligence and motivation, as well as how to navigate people who sit at the more challenging end of the personality spectrum.
Emotional Intelligence: The Skill That Makes Everything Else Work
The Big Five give you the structural architecture of personality. But there is another dimension that operates alongside them and is equally critical in any professional or interpersonal context: Emotional Intelligence (frequently called EQ).
EQ is the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and respond effectively to emotions, both your own and those of others. In practice, it means:
Knowing what you're feeling, in real time, and being able to name it
Reading the emotional temperature of a room accurately
De-escalating. If someone becomes aggressive, can you bring them down without matching their heat?
Perspective-taking - genuinely seeing the world through another person's eyes
Understanding the impact of your own behavior on others
That last one deserves a story. I once read a post on Reddit from someone who was genuinely puzzled and concerned because people walking past him kept raising their hand to their head. He wondered if something about his appearance was alarming. The comments offered all kinds of suggestions. My own thought, which I can’t confirm since I’ve long since skimmed past the post, was simpler: the sun was probably shining from behind him, and the people walking toward him were shielding their eyes from the sudden glare. He didn't see that. That inability to read how his own presence and position was affecting others is a small but perfect illustration of a gap in EQ.
EQ in Negotiation is Your Best Defense and Your Sharpest Tool
Knowing yourself and reading others accurately isn't just personally useful. In negotiation, it is one of the most powerful advantages you can have, and one of the most overlooked.
When someone deploys a psychological tactic against you, such as manufactured urgency, deliberate ambiguity, a comment designed to make you feel off-balance, the natural response is to react. To defend, to escalate, to absorb the discomfort and let it shape your next move without realizing it's doing so. This is exactly what the tactic is designed to produce.
High EQ interrupts that cycle. When you can name what is happening calmly, in real time, the tactic loses most of its power. There is an enormous difference between being rattled by a move and observing it. The moment you can say, I see what is happening here, you have stepped out of the emotional vortex and back onto solid ground.
This is also why knowing the other person's personality profile, their emotional patterns, their likely pressure points, matters so much. The more accurately you can read who you are dealing with, what they are feeling, what they are afraid of, what they need from this interaction, the more precisely you can respond rather than react and communicate in a way that actually reaches them.
Trust, Integrity, and What Happens When They Break Down
Alongside personality, trust is one of the most critical variables in any professional relationship. Trust breaks down into three components worth assessing separately:
Ability - can they actually do what they say they can do?
Benevolence - do they genuinely care about others' wellbeing, not just their own?
Integrity - are they fair, honest?
Predictablity - can I know what to expect with them?
When integrity breaks down within an organization, specific conditions are almost always present: the perception that the organization has been dishonest; a sense of unequal treatment with no clear rationale; a low-trust environment running in both directions; and broken promises (for example, the commitment made at hire that quietly disappear). These are the conditions under which the most dangerous organizational failures, particularly including insider threat, take root. We'll explore this in depth in a future series.
Motivation
Understanding personality tells you how a person operates. Understanding motivation tells you why they act as they do. Cybercrime researcher James McDowell identifies three core pillars of human motivation, originally in the context of cybercrime, but applicable across any domain:
Money: financial gain, material security, economic incentive
Meaning: values, ideology, moral conviction; fighting for something larger than oneself
Me: recognition, validation, status, revenge, thrill; the need to feel significant or vindicated
Most people are driven by some combination of all three, but one typically dominates. The person who turns down a large buyout but lights up at the mention of a public honor is telling you something. The person who takes a pay cut to join a mission-driven organization is telling you something. Listen to what drives behavior before assuming you understand the goal.
Dealing with Difficult People: Start With Yourself
Before we look at specific difficult personality types, first and foremost, and what I won’t cease to remind you, the first step is always to turn inward. (Can you guess what personality traits I’ve just invoked there?) What triggers you? What are you sensitive to? What are you likely to react to disproportionately?
This is not optional self-reflection. It is operationally critical. Because you are your own reference point for everyone you meet, and if you don't know your own lens, you'll mistake your reaction for objective truth.
I rate low on Neuroticism. That sounds like an advantage, and in many ways it is. But it also means I'm more likely to side with the less emotional party in an interaction. This shows up across personality traits. I do well explaining things to introverts who tend to naturally display a calm manner. And I have a tendency to dismiss extraverts' more dramatic and loud responses as excessive. Notice the judgment in that observation. That's my personality coloring my perception. Being aware of it changes how I work with people.
The Supremely Confident
These are people who have reached positions of power, because they believe that they are right and don’t/won’t hear otherwise. They believe themselves to be the only one who is truly the best person to take their group/company/country forward.
When dealing with this individual, play into their confidence. Use flattery. Communicate admiration of who they are.
Retiring the CEO
A board needs to move a founder-CEO out of his operational role as the company scales. He's been the visionary for fifteen years. He built everything. But it is time to change direction and he is no longer the right person for the job. Even with an offer of a significant financial package, direct conversation about this quickly became explosive and threatened to seriously harm the operations. The board's solution: create a Chairman Emeritus role with a meaningful title, a speaking platform at the company's annual conference, and a mandate to represent the company's values externally. The CEO accepts even without significant financial motivation. His emotional need for significance and recognition has been genuinely met. His driver was never money. It was Me.
When you're negotiating with someone who fits this profile, the content of the deal matters less than you might think. What matters most is the story they get to tell afterward.
Their identity is bound up in being right, in being the one who drove the outcome, in being seen by their people as the person who won. If the deal you're proposing is genuinely good for them but lands in a way that makes them look like they compromised or backed down, they will resist it, even to their own detriment. Conversely, a deal that is slightly less favorable to them on paper but allows them to walk back into their boardroom, their family, their inner circle and say "I got what I came for", that deal will close.
So build the off-ramp into your proposal from the beginning. Think about how they will narrate this. Give them something they can point to as a win, a concession that costs you little but that they can hold up as evidence of their own effectiveness. Let them feel they pushed you somewhere. In some negotiations, the most important move you make is the one that lets the other person feel they made you make it.
Don't expect their full attention, and genuinely don't take it personally. This personality type moves fast, gets distracted by their own importance, and may seem dismissive or only half-present at times. It isn't rudeness exactly, it's the restlessness of someone who is always partly already in the next room. Stay grounded, stay focused, and don't misread their distraction as disrespect.
Daniel is a 54-year-old entrepreneur who built a successful business over twenty years and has structured much of his identity around that achievement. His marriage of eighteen years is ending, and he has arrived at the mediation process the way he arrives at most things, certain that he is the most capable person in the room and that the outcome should reflect that.
His wife Becka’s lawyer has done her homework. She knows that Daniel's primary vulnerability is not financial. He can absorb a significant settlement without it meaningfully affecting his life. What he cannot absorb, psychologically, is the feeling of having been beaten. Of having sat across a table and come away with less. Of going back to his business partners, his friends, his aging father who built the first version of the company with him, and having to explain that he lost.
So Becka’s lawyer doesn't try to beat him. She structures the proposal so that Daniel can win.
She gives him the business, the asset he cares most about, the one that carries his name and his story, while ensuring that Becka receives a financial settlement that accurately reflects her twenty years of contribution to the family that made that business possible. She frames every element of the proposal around Daniel's narrative. He kept the company. He protected what he built. He was decisive and he moved things forward. The fact that Becka walks away with a settlement that gives her genuine financial security is presented not as a concession Daniel made but as a decision he took, the mark of someone big enough to be fair.
Daniel accepts within two sessions. He tells his lawyer afterward that he felt the process was handled with respect. Becka’s lawyer says nothing about this to anyone. She has learned that with this personality type, the most effective victories are the ones where the other side never quite realizes they conceded anything at all.
The Charismatic and Cunning
When dealing with the very charismatic and cunning person, mark these wise words from Taylor et al. (2015) carefully: “information is a commodity to be traded”. What this person tells you is not about truth. It is about arranging, or rearranging, the situation to serve their goals. Every disclosure is a calculation. Every confidence shared is an investment expected to return something. This doesn't mean everything they say is false, some of it will be entirely accurate. But the criterion for what they say is never "is this true?" It is always "does this serve me?"
These people are often extraordinarily charming. Not superficially charming, genuinely, disarmingly, remarkably good to be around. They remember details about you. They make you feel seen. They have a gift for finding exactly the frequency you're on and matching it so precisely that the conversation feels like the most natural thing in the world. People leave interactions with them feeling energized, flattered, chosen.
And that, the universality of it, is exactly the warning sign.
Most people are complicated. We like some things about them and not others. We enjoy their company in certain contexts and find them difficult in others. We hold a mixture of admiration and reservation that reflects the genuine complexity of another human being. When someone seems to have no rough edges at all, when everyone likes them, when every interaction feels frictionless, when you find yourself thinking "I can't find a single thing wrong with this person", that smoothness is worth examining. Not because good people don't exist, but because this particular kind of universal, effortless appeal is sometimes less a personality and more a performance.
The most dangerous version of this type is not the obvious manipulator. It's the one you would defend to other people. The one you would feel slightly offended on behalf of if someone raised a concern. That fierce protectiveness you feel, that "no, you don't understand, he's actually incredibly genuine", is worth sitting with quietly for a moment. Ask yourself where it's coming from.
A few things to keep in mind when you find yourself in this person's orbit:
Avoid power struggles. Do not go head-to-head with this person directly, and do not try to expose them publicly. They are almost always better at this game than you are, they have been playing it longer, and a direct confrontation gives them something to respond to. They are significantly more dangerous when they have a target.
Protect your information. You don't need to be hostile or withholding, just thoughtful. Before you share something, ask yourself: what could this person do with this if they chose to? You are not being paranoid. You are being appropriately careful.
Notice what you're feeling. Specifically, notice if you feel a quality of adoration that has no ambivalence in it at all, a pull that feels less like genuine affection and more like a kind of spell. Most of us are not used to being made to feel this good by someone we've known for a short time. That feeling is information. It doesn't mean the person is definitely dangerous. But it means your critical faculty has been softened, and that is precisely when you most need it.
Your reasoning is your best defense. Not your gut, your gut has been charmed. Slow down. Look at the facts of what has happened, not the feeling of how it felt. Ask the questions you find yourself not wanting to ask because they might spoil something. If the answers hold up, you have lost nothing. If they don't, you have saved yourself something significant.
There is a particular kind of loneliness in realizing that someone you trusted was performing the whole time. But the alternative, staying in that performance because it felt good, tends to be considerably more expensive.
The Volatile and Moody
This personality is not uncommon in senior leadership, and if you have worked in a high-performing organization for any length of time, you have almost certainly encountered one. They are often the most alive person in the building. The most creative. The one whose vision genuinely moves things forward and whose energy, on a good day, makes everyone around them feel like they are part of something worth doing.
The problem is the other days.
Think of the brilliant founder who can reduce a room to silence with a single insight and reduce an individual colleague to rubble with a single comment, without realizing they've done either. Think of the leader whose approval feels like sunlight and whose disapproval feels like an icy winter storm. Whose door you approach differently depending on what you've heard about their morning. Who can be genuinely, transformatively generous one week and cutting and unreachable the next, with no event you can point to that explains the shift.
Their emotional world is not like most people's emotional world. Feelings arrive at full volume, without the usual buffering. They idealize and they devalue - people, projects, ideas. They do so completely, and sometimes rapidly. The colleague who was described as irreplaceable in January is being quietly frozen out by March. The project that was going to change everything is, six weeks later, a source of visible contempt. If you have been on the receiving end of the idealization, if you have been the irreplaceable one, the person they couldn't imagine the organization without, you will eventually find out what the other side feels like. It is important to know this going in.
Working with this personality well requires a specific kind of steadiness, a groundedness that doesn't depend on their approval to stay intact.
Let them idealize you. When they are high on you, when you are the person they trust and rely on and speak about with warmth. Lean into it with genuineness. This is when you have access, when you can influence, when the relationship has real currency. Use it thoughtfully.
But do not buy into the idealization yourself. This is the harder part. When someone in a position of power treats you as exceptional, as uniquely understood, as the one person who really gets it, that feels good in a way that is worth being honest about. It can become something you work to maintain without realizing you're doing it. The fall from that position, when it comes, will feel personal and disorienting if you have come to depend on it. Know that you will fall. Prepare for it. And when it happens, do not scramble to get back on the pedestal, that scrambling is precisely where people lose themselves with this personality type.
If you are a high achiever, be particularly careful. High achievers are unusually vulnerable here, because the approval of someone genuinely talented feels like meaningful validation. It can quietly become the thing you are optimizing for without realizing it. You find yourself softening feedback you should give, avoiding conversations you should have, shaping your behavior around what will land well with them rather than what is actually right. Notice it early.
Their reactions will sometimes be wildly disproportionate to what actually happened. A small administrative oversight becomes evidence of fundamental disrespect. A missed call becomes abandonment. A piece of constructive feedback becomes a personal attack. This is their genuine, felt experience. Prepare for it mentally before it happens, because if you encounter it for the first time in the moment, it is almost impossible not to respond defensively. And defensiveness with this personality escalates things rather than resolving them.
When they are upset, they will expect you to already know why. To them, it is obvious and impossible to have missed. Just ask, directly and to the point, what upset them. Don’t allow them to expect you to know what and why they feel. They are adults and can figure out how to explain it to you, and you can ask that of them.
Keep telling them they matter. Genuinely and regularly. This personality has an enormous appetite for reassurance that is rarely fully satisfied, and the times they most need to hear it are usually the times they are behaving in ways that make it hardest to say. Say it anyway. A simple "I want you to know I value what you bring to this" delivered in the right moment costs you very little and can change the temperature of the entire interaction.
Think of it, sometimes, like working with a very gifted five-year-old. Not as a dismissal, their talent is real, their contributions are real, and the relationship can be genuinely rewarding. But the emotional register is that of someone who has not yet developed the internal scaffolding to contain what they feel. And just as you would not take it personally when a five-year-old dissolves over the wrong color cup, you have to find a way to not take this personally either, which is significantly harder when the five-year-old controls your budget or your career trajectory.
Meet the volatility with steadiness. Hold your own ground, your values, your standards, your sense of what is true, without needing to fight for it in the moment. And don't go into this relationship expecting the individual to fundamentally change. They won't, at least not without significant personal work on their part, and that is not something you can engineer or wait for. What you are dealing with is not a management problem that the right conversation will eventually fix, or a rough patch that will smooth out once the pressure eases. This is who they are. The people who thrive in their orbit are the ones who stopped hoping things would eventually settle down, accepted the reality of who they were working for, and built their approach around that reality, rather than around the leader they wished was sitting in that chair.
YOUR PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYS
Identify the person in your professional life whose emotional reactions most consistently puzzle or irritate you. Ask yourself: what does their personality profile look like? What does mine look like? Where is the mismatch?
The next time you feel absolute certainty that someone is wrong or irrational, pause. Ask: is this an accurate read, or is my own personality filtering what I'm seeing?
For every difficult person in your life: do you know what drives them? Money, meaning, or Me? The answer will tell you more about how to reach them than almost anything else.
COMING UP NEXT
We've covered the structure of personality, but knowing someone's profile is only the beginning. In the series ahead we go deeper: into the stories people tell about themselves, the self-beliefs that drive behavior below the surface, and the emotional modes that hijack us under pressure without warning. We'll look at how these patterns create vulnerability, how people end up in abusive relationships, how blackmail exploits identity and shame, and how cybercriminals hunt for human weaknesses rather than technical ones. We'll get into insider threat, cognitive biases, and how to build a company culture that doesn't quietly create the conditions for its own undoing. We'll apply all of this to negotiation, from boardroom deals to custody battles - and look at how profiling changes the game in business, in managing litigation, and in any situation where understanding who you're really dealing with is the difference between a good outcome and an expensive one.
— End of Series: Part One —
