Very tired dealing with an insecure colleague.
How do you deal with an insecure colleague who constantly disagrees with you for the sake of disagreeing?
I work with this colleague and I’m new in the company for a few months. Boss seems to be extra nice to me and I do find I may be getting better treatment but that’s also because I believe I got more work done faster than expected. This colleague often shows up late, leaves early and spends her time disturbing others to chit chat. I don’t see her getting much done during office hours. So recently I’ve been assigned to help her as she declared she can’t meet her deadlines. I sensed she wasn’t happy about it as I’m her junior. The way she talked to me, any human would be able to sense her hostility towards me. I may be wrong but I suspect her coldness towards me is that maybe she feel that I may take over her job one day.
It was only when I needed to contact her regarding the projects that I realised she had blocked me. I just want to ride over getting the work done so I emailed her but she doesn’t reply too. When I try to discuss with her at work she would disagree to everything that I’ve suggested. Because she refuses to talk to me, I ended up doing most of the work alone but I submitted both our names as it was originally her projects. All my ideas that she rejected were actually accepted and highly discussed with interest during the meeting so I was sure I picked out suitable highlights to focus and improve on.
Due to the ‘success’ of the first team project, I have been tasked to team up with her again as she still have pending projects. Now, on top of working on my own assignments, I will likely be doing her work on my own again.
On one hand, I didn’t want to completely take over her work as I thought this should be the reason why she is cold towards me. But at the same time, I would really rather get it all done with minimum conflict since she is unwilling to have a proper conversation with me. I am aware my superior has a rough idea what’s going on. I do not wish to cause my colleague trouble too. What can I do to improve the situation? She is very hard to talk to so I really don’t know what to do. I do not wish to involve a 3rd person as I fear making matters worse or start any gossip.
I really like this company and enjoy my work so I don’t have plans to quit because of this. Help!