This question is a test of professionalism and emotional intelligence, and it's surprisingly easy to fail. The moment you sound like you're complaining about a former colleague — even if you're technically describing a real situation — you've damaged your chances. The interviewer doesn't know if your old coworker was difficult or if you were. They're watching how you handle the telling.
What this question is really testing
The interviewer is checking for:
Professionalism under friction. Working with difficult people is a normal part of most jobs. Can you handle it without making it everyone else's problem?
Conflict resolution skills. Do you avoid difficult conversations, escalate unnecessarily, or find a way through? Most interviewers want to see that you try direct resolution first.
Empathy and perspective-taking. The strongest answers acknowledge that the other person may have had valid reasons for their behaviour. Painting a former colleague as a villain signals poor self-awareness.
Outcome-orientation. Did things improve? Did the work get done? Did you learn something?
The trap: venting vs demonstrating
The worst answers have a consistent pattern: too much time spent describing how difficult the other person was, and too little time on what you actually did. The story becomes a grievance rather than a demonstration of capability. Even if your former colleague really was genuinely unreasonable, the interview is not the place to establish that.
Keep your description of the "difficult" behaviour factual and brief. Spend most of your answer on your response and the outcome.
How to structure your answer
Use STAR, but weight it toward Action and Result:
Situation: Brief context — what the working relationship was and what the nature of the difficulty was. One or two sentences, factual, no editorialising.
Task: What you needed to accomplish together or what the friction was affecting.
Action: This is the core. What specifically did you do? Did you initiate a conversation? Try to understand their perspective? Adjust your own approach? Escalate — and if so, why and to whom?
Result: How did it end? Ideally there's a resolution — the relationship improved, the work got delivered, something specific changed. If the situation didn't fully resolve, acknowledge that honestly and focus on what you learned.
Sample answer
"On a project last year, I was working closely with a colleague from another department who had a very different way of working to me. I prefer to agree on deliverables upfront and work to those; he tended to iterate a lot and change direction mid-stream, which meant I kept reworking things I thought were signed off. It was creating tension and slowing us both down.
Rather than keep absorbing the friction, I asked if we could have a quick conversation about how we were working together. I went into it genuinely curious — I wanted to understand whether the iteration was how he always worked, or if there was something specific about this project that was creating the churn. It turned out he'd had bad experiences in the past where things were signed off and then changed by leadership at the last minute, so he'd started iterating defensively.
Once I understood that, we agreed on a slightly different process — I'd do a light-touch version of each deliverable first so he could iterate before I spent time on the final version. The rest of the project ran much more smoothly and we actually ended up working well together. I left that situation having genuinely learned something about why different people have the working styles they do."