The Martyr at Work- How to lead and develop a difficult but principled colleague

1: Who is the Martyr?

Judgemental, disdainful, highly-principled and self-sacrificing.

At work, the Martyr might despise you, burn you out – or both. But one thing they won’t do is compromise.

If you get the relationships right though, Martyrs can be transformative leaders and deeply loyal colleagues.

  • They’ll seek out far-reaching improvements.
  • They’ll act selflessly in service of customers and clients.
  • At their best, a Martyr will be the kind of person who makes you sigh with relief when they arrive, because they’re prepared to tackle issues that everybody else thought were impossible.

I’m Nick Robinson. I’ve been an Executive Coach for over 25 years and I wrote the best-selling book The 9 Types of Difficult People, published by Pearson.

My book is all about turning challenging dynamics into great working relationships – so everyone can be at their best at work. It’s about helping people to do well and to feel good about it.

This article accompanies my video series on The Martyr – a highly principled person who can become difficult if they don’t feel that others are as committed as they are.

In the rest of this article, I’ll show you how to spot a Martyr, how to lead them well, and how to develop them into a powerful and influential leader.

Follow me for more on The Martyr – and for practical ways to handle challenging dynamics at work.


2: How to Spot a Martyr

The Martyr at work is highly-principled – and can become difficult if they feel their bosses and colleagues aren’t as committed as they are.

If you miss the signs, their refusal to compromise and habit of burning themselves out can cause real problems:

  • Deliverables you thought were certain can vanish.
  • Key stakeholders get cut out – no longer trusted to contribute.
  • The Martyr sacrifices their own wellbeing and ends up unable to support an overstretched team.
  • This article accompanies my short video series on The Martyr – one of the nine types from my book.

I’m Nick Robinson, Executive Coach and author of The 9 Types of Difficult People, published by Pearson.

Here’s what to look for if you think you’ve got a Martyr on your hands.

1️⃣ Martyrs often turn their back on colleagues they see as less principled:

  • They might ignore them – or be openly disdainful: “They don’t care about what really matters!”

2️⃣ You and others might be denied access to their teams:

  • Inside that defensive cordon, weaker team members may be carried – not developed or moved on.

3️⃣ Projects may stall – not through lack of effort, but because there’s no influencing:

  • No horse-trading. No compromise. And that’s what gets things done in the real world.

In the next part, I’ll show you how to lead a Martyr.

Follow me for more ways to turn challenging dynamics into great working relationships.


3: How to Lead a Martyr

They won’t compromise. But they will judge you – especially if you don’t match their level of commitment or principles.

That’s the Martyr at work. To lead them well, it’s crucial to re-engage with their principles.

Get this right, and a Martyr can become an influential leader – fearlessly ready to tackle anything.

Get it wrong, and you’ll be locked out. Projects stalled. The Martyr and their team burnt out.

This article accompanies my short video series on The Martyr

I’m Nick Robinson, Executive Coach and author of the best-selling 9 Types of Difficult People, published by Pearson.

Here’s how to re-engage with a Martyr and lead them well.

First: their courage is often external. They act for a cause, not personal ambition:

  • To connect, show them you’ve got principles too – and that you’ll also stand up for them.

Second: Martyrs often overlook real-world constraints:

  • Bring them into planning – so they see the limits, the stakeholders to be influenced, and why compromise matters if progress is to happen.

Finally: don’t play into their self-sacrifice:

  • Did you set them up to fail by handing over the impossible?
  • Is your culture so averse to failure that they feel forced to work in secret?

In the next part, I’ll show you how to develop a Martyr into a powerful, effective leader.

Follow me for practical tips on handling challenging dynamics at work.


4: How to Develop a Martyr

Judgemental. Disdainful. Highly-principled. Self-sacrificing. At work, the Martyr might despise you, burn you out – or both. But they won’t compromise.

Developing a Martyr takes trust – but it’s worth it.

When they get it, a Martyr becomes a powerhouse – able to influence past roadblocks, supported by loyal followers, and sustained by healthy balance.

This is the final part accompanying my short video series on The Martyr.

I’m Nick Robinson – Executive Coach and author of the best-selling 9 Types of Difficult People, published by Pearson.

If you’re a leader or HR professional looking to develop a Martyr’s potential – here are four things to cover.

1️⃣ Martyrs often see others as weak – not living up to their principles and integrity.

  • Help them explore how those judgements can block progress on things they care about.

2️⃣ Explore how their refusal to compromise can often hide a fear of being blamed for an imperfect outcome.

3️⃣ Help them see that influencing isn’t bad.

  • It’s not manipulation. It’s about finding common ground so everyone benefits.

4️⃣ Get them thinking about the true cost of their self-sacrifice.

  • How could they work with those who aren’t fully on-side – rather than always pushing against them?

So that’s the Martyr: Driven. Highly-principled. Capable of being an inspiring leader, with great influencing skills and a healthy balance.

Follow me for more practical tips on turning challenging dynamics into great working relationships. You can find The 9 Types of Difficult People on Amazon [here] and in any good bookstore.

How Leaders can Spot, Deal With and Transform a Dark Strategist

Have you got a colleague or a team member who thinks you’re a bit stupid and somehow always lets you know it?

Who tries to manage people like chess pieces; to be moved around as they see fit, until it’s time to go back in the box?

If this makes things difficult at work, then you might have a Dark Strategist on your team.

In this video I explain who a Dark Strategist is and why it’s crucial to do something about them. I’ll talk about how to spot them, the problems they cause and how to start changing things for the better.

I’m Nick Robinson and I’m an Executive Coach and the author of The 9 Types of Difficult People, published by Pearson. I’ve been coaching for over 25 years and I specialise in helping difficult individuals and teams to be effective and feel good about their work.

How Leaders Can Spot, Deal With, and Transform a Scary Specialist

The Scary Specialist is the expert who isn’t afraid to let you know it.

They’ll weaponise their expertise to avoid being controlled. In the wrong circumstances they can cause significant damage to your organisation. Forcing people to leave or quiet-quit, paradoxically lowering performance. Making you and colleagues tiptoe around them, blocking your attempts to improve things and blaming everybody else for not being up to the job.

But at their best, they can be great. Raising standards, setting the pace for delivery and being the powerhouse of your business.

In this video for leaders and HR professionals, I’ve set out:

  • how to spot a Scary Specialist; the signs to look out for, the impacts to be aware of;
  • my three leadership strategies for dealing with a Scary Specialist and making sure you hang-on to what makes them useful;
  • four must-try development tips for transforming them into someone who, instead of being scary, will uplift the whole team.

If you found this helpful, share it with a colleague who’s facing a Scary Specialist. And follow for more on turning difficult dynamics into great working relationships.

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