my coworker disrupts meetings and explodes or freezes us out if she’s angry

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I work on a four-person core team, and we have a standing weekly meeting that is required of every team in our organization. We are all of equal standing and all have at least a decade of experience in our field. Occasionally a supervisor will come to these meetings, but often it’s the four core, plus a specialist or two who have info to share.

One team member, Jade, is derailing these meetings. She comes late, won’t stay on topic, talks about personal issues over the actual meeting conversations, makes phone calls, orders food, checks her bank account, and then wants us to repeat ourselves and catch her up multiple times in the course of a meeting.

She is explosive when confronted, no matter how nice you are, but we can’t continue this way, so our team lead bit the bullet and had a private conversation with her. It went exactly as expected — explosive, deflection of responsibility, accusations of us talking behind her back and ganging up on her, all things she’s had other colleagues do in the past. It’s a recurring problem for her, but she’s not able to reflect and see that her behaviors are the issue and will continue to follow her. She thinks she’s “just loud,” but she’s terrifying when she gets “loud.”

Now that our team lead has let her know that we’re all frustrated, I’m expecting either a big freeze-out or a massive explosion. How do we continue to do our jobs and have these meetings with a coworker like this? I don’t even want to have a conversation with her now because I’ve seen how she treats other people and I don’t want to be her next target. Our boss is pretty powerless to fire her despite numerous complaints from clients and other coworkers about her explosiveness, and we don’t hate her, we just want her to stay on task and help us get our work done. And not yell when we ask her to stay on task.

This is a management problem more than it’s a Jade problem.

Or at least it is if they know about it. It sounds like your four-person core team functions pretty independently. Does your manager — not just your team lead but your manager — know about the issues with Jade? And not just “is broadly aware that Jade is difficult,” but is she actively aware that Jade is currently disrupting meetings and either freezing out or exploding at people?

If she’s aware of that and choosing to do nothing — or addressing it but wimpily enough that nothing changes — then this is on your boss for not doing a basic part of her job, which should include laying out very clearly for Jade that her behavior is unacceptable and needs to change and then enforcing consequences if it doesn’t.

You said your boss is powerless to fire her despite multiple complaints, and I’m curious why that is. Is Jade protected by someone above her? Or is your manager just a weak boss who won’t do the work of managing her? Even if your boss’s hands are truly tied when it comes to firing her (which often really just means “not willing to jump through the bureaucratic hoops it would take” or “not willing to make the case for firing her to someone higher up”), she should still be intervening much more actively — for example, sitting in on more of your meetings and calling Jade out when she’s derailing them, speaking to her after every unacceptable incident, etc.

If you’re dealing with a wimpy boss, sometimes you can move that kind of manager to action by making it more painful for them to do nothing — meaning that you alert them every time Jade misbehaves and ask them to handle it. Make it as much their problem as you can: “Jade blew up in today’s meeting — can you please speak with her?” … “Can you sit in on today’s meeting so it doesn’t go off the rails again?” … “Jade refuses to speak to me and I need info on X — what do you want me to do?” … etc.

You can also decide you don’t care if Jade freezes you out or explodes. I realize ignoring an explosion is easier said than done, but assuming you don’t fear actual physical violence from her, what would happen if you all just … ignored her? Or left the room?

Ideally the group of you would also call Jade out when she’s disrupting meetings — such as by telling her to go to another room if she’s going to make a phone call, cutting off her off-topic monologues and saying you need to stick to the agenda, declining to continually update her when she wasn’t paying attention, etc. I assume that’s not happening because everyone is afraid of her, but there’s power in deciding as a group that you’re not going to let her manipulate you that way and will be asserting that no, she can’t disrupt meetings anymore. If it brings this all to a head in a huge blow-out, which it might … well, that might be useful in finally getting some of this addressed.