Tell Me About a Time You Worked With Someone You Didn't Like: Answer Guide and Examples 2026

Every workplace contains someone you will not get along with. It might be a colleague whose standards feel sloppy to you, a teammate who takes credit, a senior who is abrasive, or simply someone whose values sit at the opposite end of the spectrum from yours. You will not get to choose them, and the work still has to get done.

"Tell me about a time you had to work with someone you didn't like" asks you to replay one of those situations. Unlike a polished question about your greatest achievement, it puts you in a moment where you were irritated, frustrated or even angry, and lets the interviewer watch what you did with that feeling. It is one of the most revealing behavioural interview questions because it is very hard to fake. Candidates who tend to blame others usually can't help doing it in the story itself.

The question is especially common in graduate schemes, in client-facing roles, and in industries where long hours and high stakes make friction inevitable: investment banking, consulting, law, healthcare, hospitality and fast-growing tech companies. In those settings, an interviewer is effectively asking: "When this job gets hard and the person next to you is getting on your nerves, will you still be someone we can rely on?"

Experienced interviewers listen for six things in this answer. Knowing them lets you check your story against what is really being assessed.

1. The kind of person you are

How you describe someone you dislike is a proxy for your character. Do you speak about them with basic respect, or with contempt? Can you acknowledge a strength they had? People who can say "she was abrasive, but she was usually right about the numbers" come across as fair-minded and secure. People who can only list faults come across as resentful.

2. How you respond to adversity

A difficult colleague is a form of sustained adversity. The interviewer is projecting forward: in a tough industry with demanding clients and tight deadlines, will you persist, adapt and keep your standards, or will your performance drop when the environment becomes unpleasant? Answers that describe steady effort over weeks or months are more convincing than a single heroic conversation.

3. How you handle conflict

Most people have a default conflict style. The well-known Thomas-Kilmann model describes five: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. None is always wrong, but interviewers want to see that you can choose a style deliberately rather than react on autopilot. A story where you started by avoiding the person, then realised it was hurting the work and moved to a direct, collaborative conversation shows exactly that kind of range.

4–6. The three dials: blame, shutdown and engagement

The most useful way to think about this question is as three dials the interviewer is quietly reading as you talk.

The ideal answer reads as low blame, low shutdown, high engagement. Note that "low blame" does not mean pretending the other person did nothing wrong. It means you describe their behaviour factually and spend more time on what you could control. Likewise, "low shutdown" does not mean you never felt like withdrawing. Admitting the instinct and showing you overrode it is more credible than claiming you were unaffected.

The best story is about someone you fundamentally disagreed with, where that disagreement turned into real personal dislike, and where you still had to work together to deliver something. That combination gives you the most to talk about. A mild difference in taste with a colleague you otherwise liked is too small; a story about someone who behaved unethically is a different question entirely (see the warning below).

Use the most recent strong example you have. Recency signals that the story reflects who you are now. The table shows how each life stage tends to land.

What makes a story "fundamental"

The richest stories involve a clash of values or principles rather than a clash of personalities alone. Common examples include:

• Quality versus speed: you wanted to get it right; they wanted to get it done (or the reverse).
• Credit and fairness: they took ownership of shared work or dominated discussions.
• Rules versus pragmatism: one of you followed process to the letter; the other bent it.
• Communication style: blunt and confrontational versus diplomatic and indirect.
• Commitment: different views on how much effort, time or care the work deserved.

The STAR method is a sound base, but on this question candidates using STAR often spend their whole Situation describing how awful the other person was. CLASH fixes that by building fairness and self-reflection into the structure and putting most of your time into what you did.

Language for each step

• Context: "We were paired for a twelve-week project worth 40% of the module grade..."
• Label: "We had very different ideas about what 'finished' meant. He was decisive and quick; I like to test things before committing."
• Accept: "Honestly, I started to dread our meetings, and I was re-doing his sections without telling him, which only made him more defensive."
• Shift: "I asked to talk one-to-one, told him what I'd been doing and why, and proposed that..."
• Harvest: "We submitted on time and scored a 2:1. We were never close, but we worked well enough to team up again. Now I raise differences in standards in the first week, not the fifth."

These examples move from childhood to a demanding professional role. They are illustrations of structure and tone, not scripts. Interviewers recognise memorised answers quickly, so use them to shape a story from your own experience.

Example 1: Primary school science fair (brief origin story)

What it reveals: self-awareness about a lifelong pattern. Notice it bridges straight to a recent example. Use this only when asked about any point in your life.

Example 2: High school football team

What it reveals: honesty about a shutdown instinct, and the decision to override it for a shared goal.

Example 3: University group project

What it reveals: very low blame. The candidate names their own passive-aggression, which is rare and memorable.

Example 4: Part-time job in a restaurant kitchen

What it reveals: resilience under adversity. The candidate keeps their own values ("I don't think shouting is good leadership") without letting them become an excuse.

Example 5: Last company, a high-pressure professional role

What it reveals: all three dials at once. Fair about the colleague's strengths, honest about a counter-productive coping habit, proactive, and willing to escalate proportionately and transparently.

The difference between a weak and strong answer is rarely the story itself. It is how the story is told. Here is the university example from a blame-heavy, shutdown-heavy angle.

Weak version

Strong version

In demanding industries, interviewers are not just checking you are pleasant. They are checking that friction won't degrade your output when the hours are long and the stakes are high. Tailor which part of your story you emphasise.

Some employers publish values that map directly onto this question. Amazon's Leadership Principles, for example, include "Earn Trust" and "Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit". Our Amazon interview questions guide covers these in more depth. Always check each employer's own careers pages rather than relying on forum reports.

Situational judgement tests (SJTs) also frequently present scenarios with an uncooperative colleague and ask you to rank responses. The same principles apply: engage directly first, keep the work moving, and escalate only when needed. Practise with our situational judgement test guide.

This question comes in many forms. One well-prepared CLASH story can answer all of them with a change of emphasis.

Follow-up questions to prepare for

• "Would you work with them again?" The best answer is usually yes, with what you would set up differently from day one.
• "What would they say about you?" Show empathy: name one thing they probably found frustrating about you. Our colleagues describe you guide helps here.
• "What if they had never changed?" Explain how you would protect the work regardless: clear roles, written agreements, proportionate escalation.
• "Did you ever involve your manager?" Be honest. If you did, show you tried directly first and went in with solutions, not complaints.

If the clash was with someone senior to you, our guide to disagreeing with your manager covers the extra considerations of authority. If it centred on a single dispute, the conflict resolution guide may be a better fit.

Mistake seven is easy to miss. Tone of voice gives away more than the words. If you still feel angry about the story, practise it aloud until you can tell it calmly, or pick a different one. Recording yourself and listening back is the fastest way to check. For broader practice, our common interview questions guide and conflict interview question bank give you related questions to rehearse with the same story.