How Leaders Can Spot and Deal with Scary Specialists

Picture this: a subject matter expert whose deep knowledge should be a great asset to your team—but instead, it feels like a dangerous double-edged sword. Their expertise has become weaponised, leaving you and the rest of the team walking on eggshells around them because they’re being much too difficult to get along with.

If that seems familiar, you might have a Scary Specialist on your hands.

When this happens, the costs can be significant. Talented people are likely to be leaving or quiet-quitting in significant numbers because of them. Everybody has got used to tiptoeing around them, finding any attempts to innovate or improve things blocked or disputed.

But the good news is that addressing the issue can unlock better working relationships and the full potential of your team—as well as the Scary Specialist themselves.

What you might have first noticed

  • They’ve practically weaponised their expertise, using it to make sure that no-one (their boss included) can disagree with them or control them
  • They’re highly critical of their own staff and colleagues, trying to bully people into functioning at incredibly high standards of competence
  • They frequently blame you, the admin team, the IT team, the marketing team, everybody really, complaining that they can’t function properly if you won’t do your job better
  • If they feel they can’t control something the organisation is doing, they’ll likely be finding ways to block it or sabotage it.

Unlocking the Potential of the Scary Specialist

Leading a Scary Specialist can feel like an impossible task—daunting, frustrating, and at times, exhausting. Dealing with them successfully—without also losing the good things that got them there in the first place—requires a unique strategy and a lot of holding your nerve.

But here’s the thing: while their behaviours can push leaders and teams to breaking point, they also have the potential for incredible contributions. Turning this situation around isn’t just possible; it’s a chance to transform both their impact and your team’s overall dynamic. Let’s explore how.


I’m Nick Robinson and I’m an Executive Coach, helping leaders and teams to transform challenging dynamics into great working relationships for 25 years.

I’m the author of The 9 Types of Difficult People, published by Pearson. My book went straight into the WHS business book charts, was longlisted for the business book of the year, and is consistently in Amazon’s top rankings.

This article is part of a series for leaders dealing with all kinds of difficult people and teams at work. And there’ll be videos and shorts to go with them.

Please like this article and follow me if you found it interesting or useful, and for other updates about dealing with difficult people and teams and how to turn them into great working relationships.


In the rest of this article

  1. Know what to look out for, to be sure you have got a Scary Specialist on your hands
  2. The main strategies for leaders who want to deal with the Scary Specialist on their team
  3. How I work with Scary Specialists, using the coaching approach I’ve developed to help them find much more effective ways of behaving at work, so that everybody benefits.

Key Behaviours Leaders Should Watch For

When a Scary Specialist’s behaviour begins to negatively impact the team, it’s really helpful to recognise the patterns. Here are the telltale behaviours that leaders should watch out for.

Weaponised Expertise

You can’t argue, reason or disagree with them, because they always know something you don’t—and aren’t afraid to use it. This is their way of avoiding being controlled.

Covert Bullying

The highly-competent, driven people on their team are fine. But everybody else is likely to be suffering: bullied out or criticised into submission

Criticism and Blame

When they feel safe, they’ll be vocally critical of you and colleagues, for example in Senior Leadership or Partnership meetings. Blaming you for not raising the standards in the rest of the organisation that would enable their own department to triumph. At other times, they’ll be more subtle about this, briefing against people and/or getting others to voice their complaints for them

Blocking Change and Innovation

What a Scary Specialist really wants, is for you to make everything around them as perfect as possible, without disturbing anything they are doing. There’s some logic to this. You probably hired them because they’re so good at what they do. “Why can’t you just leave me alone to get on with it?” they ask. How you deal with this depends very much on your situation, which I consider below.

Other Impacts Leaders Might See and Feel

Then there’s the impacts you might see and feel, both on yourself and on the rest of the organisation, when a Scary Specialist has become much too difficult to get along with. These include:

Collateral Damage

People might complain how they’ve feeling belittled or bullied. You’ll probably get a little of this yourself. New recruits might be leaving almost as soon as they arrive. Despite their drive for results, performance might drop, as key people leave or quiet-quit from burnout.

Tiptoeing Around

You and senior colleagues are careful around the Scary Specialist. You’re postponing tricky discussions, worrying that one wrong move might set them off. You’re avoiding making cross-functional changes, because it just isn’t worth dealing with all the resistance you’ll experience.

The Drawbridge is Up

Under pressure, Scary Specialists are highly likely to disconnect from you, their colleagues and the rest of the business. It’s a pulling-up of the drawbridge or a circling of the wagons. You might notice that disconnection itself first. Or you might notice it by the absence of their participation in anything other than their own domain. All accompanied by a very clear ‘Keep Out’ attitude towards anything or anybody that might trespass on that domain.


Dealing with a Scary Specialist

When faced with a Scary Specialist, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed or even cornered. Their behaviour can be frustrating and draining, but with the right strategies, it’s possible to transform their impact from destructive to constructive. By holding your nerve, staying focused, and applying smart leadership techniques, you can unlock significant upsides—not only for your team but for the Specialist themselves.

What to Consider First

Before getting into action, it’s worth taking a moment to assess the situation. Ask yourself these key questions to understand the stakes and your capacity to address the challenge effectively:

  • How valuable are they, compared to the damage they might be causing?
  • Is your own leadership style also highly-task-focused, so that you might be overlooking their negative impacts on people and systems?
  • What’s your scope for taking action—in particular—how much power do they wield in your organisation?

Leadership Strategies to Deploy

Once you’ve considered your position, it’s time to act. The strategies below will help you manage your Scary Specialist in a way that balances maintaining their strengths and dealing with their negative impact.

1. Rearrange things around them

In your business, the Scary Specialist might be so crucial to your success, or have so much power, that you decide it’s worth putting up with any problems they might be causing. You wouldn’t be the first leader to come to this conclusion. But first make sure you’re not just putting things off or storing up big trouble for the future.

Here’s some steps you might want to take anyway:

  • Surround your Scary Specialist with highly-competent people at all times. And make sure your human resources support, especially recruitment and employee-relations policies, are effective and water-tight—you’re going to need them
  • Check that any supporting processes and staff who contribute to the Scary Specialist’s department are equally highly-functioning and understand what’s needed of them
  • Make sure that you or someone else is doing the big-picture thinking for your organisation. Your Scary Specialist will be so focused on doing things well, that they may not stop to think about whether they’re doing the right things well.

2. Become more scary yourself

If your natural leadership style is reasonable and measured, that’s a good thing and people around you will benefit from it. But a Scary Specialist might be taking advantage of your unwillingness to be scary and unreasonable.

You need to understand that a lot of their unacceptable behaviour is driven by their own unconscious fears and habits, especially their lack of concern about people and their disregard for the strategic bigger picture.

If you can, raise the stakes so that a fear of your disapproval becomes greater than anything else that the Scary Specialist is worried about.

Before you do that, be aware that people don’t usually just become difficult in a vacuum. Consider what else in the organisation (for example, pressure to deliver) might also be driving their behaviour, and see if you need to deal with that too.

3. Demand that they raise their game

Above all else, a Scary Specialist values competence in others. So an often successful leadership strategy is to explain to them, in no uncertain terms, that the negative impacts they are having on other people in your business are a sign of incompetence on their own part.

Frame it as a series of skills that they need to develop, or else.

It’s not enough that they be highly-skilled in their area of expertise. Work these days is too interdependent for that, too reliant on whole teams of people collaborating together really well. Everybody needs skills in getting on well with others and supporting the systems that enable effective collaboration.


Coaching and Developing a Scary Specialist

Great coaching of a Scary Specialist requires a balance of empathy and firmness. By tapping into their strengths and addressing their blind spots, you can help them grow into a leader who uplifts the team rather than unsettles it.

At their best

At their very best, A Scary Specialist is a valuable member of your business, consistently delivering high-quality results again and again.

As a leader themselves, they will work hard to create the conditions where like-minded people can really shine.

When things are going well, they’re a great contributor to your team, helping to raise standards everywhere, setting the pace for success and often operating as the powerhouse for your business.

If you follow the leadership strategies above and support the coaching and development tips below, you can have a Scary Specialist who is no longer scary. Instead, they’ll use their skills to help everybody drive results and quality in a way that benefits your whole organisation.

Coaching and Development Tips

As a leader or another professional aiming to support the growth of a Scary Specialist, getting a good response when you’re coaching and developing them rests a lot on your own personal power, especially:

  • Matching their competence – they’ll be keenly scanning for any signs that you’re not up to the task, so be very good or go home
  • Expertise – they’ll want to know that you’re not delivering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ developmental process and are tailoring what you do to exactly suit them and their circumstances
  • Authority – don’t let a Scary Specialist put the responsibility for their development back onto you (which they will try to do). These are skills they need to develop because their ability to get things done well is being compromised by their lack of people and strategic skills. You’re there to support them—not do the work for them.

If you can exercise your own personal power with the ‘Fierce Compassion’ I describe in my book (empathy plus no-messing around), then here’s what else you’ll want to cover with them:

  • Hidden Shame about being unpopular – lots of Scary Specialists know that people don’t like them, but are afraid to confront it. Ask them: ‘If there was a way of still being really good at your work, without winding other people up, would you adopt it?”
  • Self-sabotage – assuming that nothing can change without getting worse
  • Blaming others – protecting themselves from overload by blaming others for what isn’t working, rather than working together to solve things
  • Visionary Leadership – developing skills in having a wider, longer-term focus and being able to inspire others with it
  • Coaching and Developing others themselves – this is often the missing link for Scary Specialists. Instead of demanding that other people be instantly competent, they learn how to share their expertise and drive in a way that enables lots more people to become top performers.

Next Steps

If you think you might be dealing with a Scary Specialist – the expert who really isn’t afraid to let you know they’re the expert – try the leadership strategies and coaching tips I’ve suggested in this article. It will demand a lot of you, but then that’s one of the huge benefits you want to unlock from your Scary Specialist—they do demand a lot of others. Use my approach to help them do that in a way that benefits everyone.

Dealing with a Scary Specialist requires courage, insight, and the right strategies. If you’re ready to turn challenging dynamics into great working relationships:

  • Start Today: Grab a copy of my book, The 9 Types of Difficult People, available on Amazon and at all major booksellers. It’s packed with practical advice to help you lead effectively.
  • Follow me: For additional resources, including videos and shorts, that expand on the insights shared here.
  • Work With Me: If you’re looking to turn the challenging dynamics of a difficult person or a tricky team into great working relationships, I’d love to explore how we might work together. Get in touch today.

Video – Boundaries at Work

Video – Difficult Conversations at Work

Business Book of the Month Webinar

I was recently interviewed by my publishers Pearson for their Business Book of the Month webinar on LinkedIn.

We talked about my book, The 9 Types of Difficult People at work and had a great Q& A session. I presented some of the most important themes from the book, including:

  • How to get your headspace right place for dealing with a difficult person at work
  • What it costs the business if you do nothing
  • Why people become difficult at work
  • Tools and strategies for dealing with them with constructively, effectively, and compassionately.

Click the play button to watch the video of our webinar.

How to Stop Being a People-Pleaser at Work – My Book in Stylist Magazine

More great coverage of The 9 Types of Difficult People in the press, including this super article in Stylist Magazine on How to Stop Being a People-Pleaser at Work

Here’s some of the highlights from the article, which I’ve linked in full below.

🔍 Acknowledging the Issue
Realising that being a people-pleaser can hinder your professional growth in quite a few different negative ways.

📝 Preparing for Difficult Conversations
Techniques for handling those necessary but challenging conversations effectively.

🚫 The Art of Saying ‘No’
Strategies to assert your needs and priorities without adding to the conflict, so enabling healthier workplace dynamics.

💪 Reclaiming Your Power
Emphasising the importance of authentic communication and setting boundaries for personal and professional development.


Click here for the full article in Stylist Magazine.


 

Why People Become Difficult at Work

Ever experienced someone being really difficult to get on with at work, and wondered WHY?

There are four key reasons:

  1. Unconscious Reactions to Stress
    They’re reacting to what’s going in inside the organisation and its operating environment (and it’s likely there are things beyond their control that the organisation itself needs to fix)
  2. Positive Intentions
    They’re trying to achieve something but are having the wrong impact
  3. Self-Doubts and Self-Sabotage
    Their own thought-processes are piling on more pressure and more rigidity in how they behave
  4. Inflexible Approaches
    They’re not switching the focus of their intentions to suit the people and circumstances around them.

When things aren’t going smoothly, if we can understand what’s behind the way someone behaves at work, it makes it much easier to help them and others to get along well together.

There’s still a lot to do, and it’s important not to jump to blaming or shaming. But understanding Why can be a crucial first step.


To discover more practical tips and strategies for dealing with a difficult person and quickly improving workplace relationships, please check-out my book The 9 Types of Difficult People or explore more of the articles and resources on this website.

My Book in Stylist Magazine: 9 types of difficult people you’ll come across at work

Very pleased to see that we’re getting some great coverage of The 9 Types of Difficult People!

The latest to appear is an article in Stylist Magazine, which bills itself as:

“… the UK’s leading media brand for professional women; talking to 5 million UK women a month and making up 40% of the women’s lifestyle sector.”

I like this article because it gives a good overview of each of the 9 types of difficult people at work. And it features really practical hints and tips to turn things around and create great working relationships for everybody.


Here’s the link to the full article in the magazine:

➽ There are 9 types of difficult people you’ll come across at work – here’s how to deal with each


The Most Committed Managers Are the Most Difficult: The Challenge of the Workplace Martyr

If you’ve ever walked the tricky tightrope of high standards and uncompromising values set by a leader who sees any deviation as a lack of dedication, then you’ve met The Martyr!

To find out how to deal with a difficult Martyr in your workplace, please read on, and check out my book, ‘The 9 Types of Difficult People’.

The Martyr is a highly-principled person with a strong work ethic who builds fiercely loyal teams. They can become judgemental, uncompromising and disconnected from people they regard as less principled or less self-sacrificing.

Whilst their dedication is inspiring, their inability to compromise can stall progress, create friction within teams, and stifle innovation.

Their judgmental outlook and disconnection from ‘less principled/dedicated’ colleagues can lead to a divisive atmosphere, undermining team cohesion and productivity. And if you work for a Martyr, there’s a strong risk that you’ll get dragged down with them, sacrificing your own career or work-life balance without needing too.

If you’ve got a Martyr in your organisation, here’s how to deal with them

If you’re their leader, make sure you’re sharing your own principles. Even if those are different from the Martyr’s, it’s a good way to re-connect with them. Then you can ensure that they know the bigger picture priorities, and why compromise is needed to make some progress towards important goals. And check that you haven’t set them up to fail, with impossible tasks, constraints they can’t control, or a highly risk-averse culture.

If you work for or alongside a Martyr, don’t tolerate their criticisms or judgements of you. And don’t let them turn their back on you. Instead, knock on their door and ask for the kind of mutual compromise that makes sustainable progress possible. Make sure you’re not relying on them to help you develop your career – they’re too ready to unconsciously sacrifice. On the whole Martyrs are sensitive to other people’s needs so will often be very open to any kind of approach.

If you want to help develop a Martyr, your focus should be on exploring what’s behind the negative judgements they make about others and the unhelpful beliefs that might be leading them to self-sacrifice.

Beyond Judgement: The Martyr’s Path to Influential Leadership

At their best, a Martyr can be a transformative leader, able to influence not judge, and so can sweep away roadblocks and be supported by passionate followers, all sustained by a healthy work-life balance.

Have you encountered a difficult Martyr in your workplace?

How did you deal the challenges they presented?

Checkmate – why your brightest colleagues try to keep you in the dark

In the chess game of work there’s a player who is often several moves ahead.

It’s the Dark Strategist 🤯

Featured in my book, The 9 Types of Difficult People, the Dark Strategist is someone who will treat others like chess pieces, to be moved around to deliver an ambitious grand plan.

It’s often just too slow, too tedious and too outside their comfort zone to explain, coach and collaborate with you instead.

But even though they’re smarter than average their approach can be flawed, with important details overlooked. And they can sometimes let a perfect concept be the enemy of a good execution.

However positive their intention, whether it’s steering the company through a crisis or grabbing an opportunity no-one else has spotted, they can leave people feeling manipulated and undervalued. So that, in the end, nothing actually gets properly done.♟️


💡 Here are some of the main tips from my book about how to throw some light on your dealings with a Dark Strategist and quickly improve working relations, whether you’re their leader, a colleague, or a team member. Or just someone who wants to help them stop being quite so difficult!

🌏 As their leader, if you can speak their language – big-picture, strategic-thinking – that’s sometimes enough to coax them out of the dark and towards a rounder approach. Treating people as people and managing concrete tasks as well as abstract strategy.

🤝 As a colleague or a team member of a Dark Strategist, you’ll also need to learn how to co-strategise, connecting your own knowledge and goals to the wider vision. This will keep them connected long enough for you to join in the big chess game too.

♟️ If you don’t do this, you’re likely to get treated as a chess piece yourself. Call this out, and don’t tolerate they’re treating you like an idiot, just because you don’t also start from a big-picture assessment of things. Collaboration is the key to a successful workplace, and doing that well depends on a good variety of skills and approaches.


In the next of these articles I’ll be taking a look at a different type of difficult person at work. Someone whose positive qualities and strong principles can themselves be the cause of problems.

And to see all of the types I’ve covered so far, or to grab a copy of my book, check out the tags below and/or the links to in the sidebar.

Worst Enemy at Work – or Best Ally? How to thrive alongside a Scary Specialist 🤨

Ever found yourself working with or for a Scary Specialist?

You know the type – brilliant, indispensable, but SO challenging to deal with! They’re the ones who know everything about a particular topic, and they’re not afraid to let you know it.


So, how do you turn this potential ‘worst enemy’ into your ‘best ally’?

Here’s the four steps you need to follow:

1️⃣ Raise Your Own Game

  • Step up your skills and knowledge. The Scary Specialist respects competence. Demonstrate your own commitment to excellence, and they’re more likely to see and respect you as a peer.

2️⃣ Speak Up, Don’t Suffer in Silence

  • If there’s an issue, voice it. Scary Specialists can be intense, but they also respect honesty and directness. Approach them with clear, constructive requests for what you want.

3️⃣ Boundaries Are Your Best Friend

  • It’s crucial to establish what you will and won’t tolerate. Be clear about your limits and communicate them confidently. Scary Specialists appreciate those who stand their ground.

4️⃣ Stay Connected

  • Keep building relationships within your team and the broader organisation. It not only prevents isolation but also offers you a wider perspective and support network.

Remember, a Scary Specialist doesn’t have to be your nightmare at work.

With the right approach, they can become an invaluable ally, helping you to new heights in your career.

📘If you want to go deeper into navigating workplace dynamics with various challenging personalities, please check out my new book, ‘The 9 Types of Difficult People’, recently published by Pearson and now in the WHS top 10 business books list. Look for the links below or in the sidebar.


And in my next article I’ll be looking at the type of difficult person closest to my own approach – the Dark Strategist 🤯