A pressing issue in leadership is understanding how to work with difficult people to bring about positive changes. A difficult person will disrupt fellowship, disable unity within a church, business, or organization and ruin relationships with specific individuals. These are grievous consequences of a difficult person’s behavior. While there are many specific techniques to be learned for coping with difficult people, there are few focused on redemptive strategies.

Let me list a few categories of difficult people.

The Space Cadet: This person lives in his or her own world and definitely walks to the beat of a different drummer. Many space cadets are extremely brilliant and creative and often this is part of the problem, they know they are extremely brilliant and at times their weird behavior is nothing more than a manifestation of pride. Like the Pharisees, the space cadet can fall into the trap of viewing everyone else as inferior (Luke 18:11).

The Garbage Collector: They love to rehearse and replay the injuries they have suffered at the hands of other people. They nurse their wounds and hold onto their wounded ill spirits. The fact that there is garbage in life is depressing enough, but to collect it and haul it around town in a dump truck for public viewing is downright sick.

The Volcano: The Volcano is an explosive, unpredictable type of person who tends to be unapproachable. Those who have to work or live with this person can never relax; they never know what might set him or her off. The good news is that the gospel has the answer for such a person. Anger is a choice; we know it is a choice because God says that it can be removed (Ephesians 4:26,31). It isn’t a pleasant task trying to help a Volcano, but remember if the Volcano doesn’t change, he or she will keep exploding on someone else.

The Thumb Sucker: Thumb suckers tend to pout, are full of self-pity, and try to get people to cater to their own desires. This pouting is used as leverage to manipulate others. If things are not going their way, they can create a heavy atmosphere that is as oppressive as a rain cloud. They can do this very cleverly. Often they employ the silent treatment to get what they want.

The User: Is the person who manipulates others for his or her own personal gain. Users avoid responsibility themselves, while demanding time and energy from others to benefit their own situations. They often use guilt to get what.

Hopefully this is a useful insight from a ministry and business perspective. It points out the need to be careful in assigning people to various roles in the organization when their personality type is not appropriate. At a minimum, such a situation would need to be monitored more closely than when an individual’s personality type was appropriate for the task at hand.