Coaching practices for How to Work with Headstrong Colleague
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Work with Headstrong Colleague, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I have to tell someone something hard about their work and I’m dreading it, because every time I do it lands like an attack and they go defensive
- I’ve quietly filed each person on my team as strong or weak, and then I’m baffled when my "strong" one flounders on something new
- I’ve got a new hire starting and the lazy move is to just hand them whatever’s piled up in the backlog
- Left alone I’ll dodge this for hours, but the moment someone else is just sitting there working nearby I somehow drop in and get going
- I’ve told my people a hundred times they can disagree with me, but they still don’t
Practices that may help
- Give and receive feedback with courage
Sit on the same side of the table: feedback as a shared problem, not an attack.
Daring Greatly, Made Practical - Assess readiness task by task, not person by person
Rate competence and commitment for the specific task in front of them, not the person overall.
Situational Leadership, Made Practical - Use genius mapping in onboarding
Surface a new hire’s geniuses early so you design their role around energy, not just skills.
The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni) - Use a body double for low-initiation tasks
Work in the physical or virtual presence of another person to borrow their initiation momentum.
Task Initiation: Overcoming the Start Problem - Teach speak-up skills, not just encourage speaking up
Give team members specific language for raising concerns, not just permission to raise them.
Psychological Safety in Teams - Adapt to Drivers: be direct, results-focused, and brief
With high-assertiveness, low-responsiveness people, lead with the bottom line and leave out the social warmup.
Social Style Matrix: Adapting to How People Communicate - Directing — high direction for the eager novice
With someone new and keen but unskilled, give clear, specific instruction and tight structure.
Situational Leadership, Made Practical - Separate the people from the problem
Be hard on the problem, soft on the people — attack the issue, not each other.
Getting to Yes: Principled Negotiation - Adapt to your manager’s communication style
Match your manager’s preferred level of detail, pace, and channel — not theirs to yours.
Managing Up: Practical Skills for Working with Your Boss - Appoint an explicit devil’s advocate role
Give one person the formal job of arguing against the plan — making dissent structural, not personal.
Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Before They Fail
Related concerns
- How Can I Work Better With A Younger Colleague
Managing up means proactively understanding your manager’s priorities, communication style, and constraints — then adapting how you work and communicate to make the partnership effective. Done well it is collaborative rather than manipulative: it reduces friction, builds trust, and creates space for greater autonomy. The evidence base is primarily organizational behavior research on leader-member exchange and practitioner consensus.
- Daring Greatly In A New Job
Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly argues that vulnerability — showing up without guarantees — is the birthplace of courage, connection, and creativity, not a weakness to hide. The ideas come from qualitative, grounded-theory research on thousands of interviews rather than controlled trials, so treat them as well-grounded patterns from lived experience rather than experimentally proven effects.
- Disagree With Manager
State your disagreement clearly, give your reasoning, and then commit to the decision — without sacrificing either honesty or loyalty.
Disagree with your manager constructively
- Getting New Boss With No Experience In The Field
With someone new and keen but unskilled, give clear, specific instruction and tight structure.
Directing — high direction for the eager novice
- How To Deal With A New Inexperienced And Hostile Colleague
With someone new and keen but unskilled, give clear, specific instruction and tight structure.
- How To Support A Coworker With Her Insecurity While Not Going Against My Own Opinions
Give team members specific language for raising concerns, not just permission to raise them.
Teach speak-up skills, not just encourage speaking up
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