— 1. Working with you is killing me
‘Working with You Is Killing Me’ looks at the colleagues, managers, and reports who make a job miserable, not through one bad day, but through a pattern that keeps repeating. The series comes in three parts, each covering a different kind of difficult work relationship.
Part 1, Being Hooked, sets out the basic mechanism: how a person or a situation can trigger a strong, repeated, negative reaction in you, and what to do about your own response when the other person is not going to change.
Part 2, The Empty Persona, looks at star performers with a serious flaw: the Hero, the Bulldozer, the Rebel, and the Pessimist. Each one delivers results, and each one does lasting damage along the way.
Part 3, Fatal Attraction, covers relationships that started well and turned toxic over time: the Exploder, the Perfectionist, the Back-Stabber, and the High Maintenance. Each type hooks a particular kind of person by meeting a need in them that is true, even if the relationship itself is not good for them.
None of this is a niche problem. Recent research from the Society for Human Resource Management puts the cost of culture-driven turnover in the US at 223 billion dollars over five years, with 58% of people who quit naming their manager as the main reason. Hogan Assessments estimates that around six percent of the workforce behaves in ways that would be called toxic, and that avoiding toxic hires could save US employers close to $292 billion in a single year. The patterns in this series are common enough to be worth naming, and costly enough to be worth doing something about.
This edit brings the original three-part series into plain, current language, and adds a short “What the Research Says” section to the end of each part, connecting ClearWater’s original framework to more recent published research on emotion regulation, personality assessment, psychological safety, and attachment at work. The case studies, examples, and core frameworks throughout are all from the original series. Nothing in the underlying content has been invented.