Dealing with Difficult People

Brenda Neckvatal helps the strongest leaders deal with the messiest people—because leadership gets real when emotions get loud, trust gets shaky, and egos start swinging. She’s a three-time bestselling author, an award-winning Human Results expert, and a serial entrepreneur featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Inc., and US News & World Report.

After 18 years inside six Fortune 500 companies, Brenda transitioned out of traditional HR and into Human Results, where the goal isn’t checking boxes. It’s getting results. Her no-fluff strategies have helped over 1,000 leaders and 700 companies avoid costly mistakes, fix toxic dynamics, and build teams that actually work.

Brenda has spoken on nearly 400 stages, delivering high-impact transformational keynotes that break through the audience’s mental background noise and land with such precision, audiences lean in, lose track of time, and get fully immersed in the message. With 30 years of experience, she’s a trusted mentor in crisis management, group dynamics, and leadership transformation—especially when the stakes are high and the people are difficult.

She also donates 32 weeks a year to The Honor Foundation, helping Navy SEALs and Special Forces veterans navigate the transition to civilian life with purpose and clarity.

When chaos shows up at your door, Brenda is the call you make. 

More at – https://brendaneckvatal.com

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, founder and president of the SynerVision Leadership Foundation, where leaders create synergy. Well, sometimes there’s some sand in the ointment. We have difficult people in our culture. Maybe it’s more than sometimes. So our topic today is dealing with difficult people. And my guest is Brenda Neckvatal. Brenda, tell people a little bit about yourself and your background and your passion for this topic.

Brenda Neckvatal:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it. I’ve been in a very interesting world for over 30 years, and I’ve been in the world of actually dealing with people as an HR professional, but I had one of my business partners, he’s like, you’re no longer an HR professional, you’re a human results professional. I’m like, I like that one a lot better, because I don’t have the co-title of Grim Reaper anymore. So what I do is I actually help leaders deal with the most difficult people and help them navigate a lot of the push and pull that happens in the workplace and it happens everywhere in life as well. So when you’re dealing with one person’s passion, you’re also dealing with your own as well. And so I really work specifically to help leaders really kind of take that command back under pressure and eliminate some of the dysfunction. that can exist and really lead without losing control. It starts a lot with self-leadership, and then it branches outward into everybody else. But sometimes you have to put a peg in your own self-leadership and deal with a crisis as it pops up. So there’s definitely some back and forth between the two of them. But that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve been doing for a very, very long time.

Hugh Ballou:
I have been dealing, I worked in megachurches, small churches, megachurches for 40 years. In the last 25 years, I’ve been working outside, helping organizations, a lot of businesses, but a lot of local charities we call nonprofits. And that’s primarily our audience. I do find a lot of consistency with this thing that you’re calling difficult people. So give us some examples of what do you mean by difficult people?

Brenda Neckvatal:
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, working with difficult people, it’s it’s kind of sliding scale and you’ve got the low end and you have a high end of it. So low end just could be that one person that is not necessarily aligned with the values of an organization, but man, they’re out there just trying to do their best. They show up in a non-profit environment, maybe as a volunteer, where they’ve got the call for service really, really imprinted deeply on their heart. But when they come in, their ideas of how things should be or their values that they express or want to live up to may not necessarily align. So there’s a little bit of a disparity. And for the vast majority of it, people can figure that part out. But then it gets to be really extreme. And you can go as far as just somebody who’s mildly disengaged all the way up to individuals who are demonstrating some of those really tough moments like those narcissistic tendencies or people that are very, very good at hiding stuff. Like, for example, like a passive aggressive individual, like passive aggressive communication and passive aggressive tendencies and behaviors is really, really challenging to deal with. some of the stuff that happens that’s more egregious can include sabotage. Let me tell you, anytime I put anything out on the internet, on social media about sabotage, I get a lot of feedback on that stuff. So it ranges, it ranges just from misalignment all the way up to really serious egregious levels of engagement.

Hugh Ballou:
So how many times do leaders actually set up these problems?

Brenda Neckvatal:
A leader that sets up the problem? Well, it works both ways. So you can have a company that has identified their core values, they’ve painted them on the wall, they’ve put them in their handbook, but they’ve never exercised them a day in existence, right? So you have that as a potential scenario. So that can line up. And then you can have individuals that don’t invest in that mindset at all. And so therefore what happens is that you know, the principles of how you operate exist within the core value. But if you’re not operating from a set of principles, you’re actually operating from a set of preferences. And the difference between the two is that your principles are very objective. They’re tied to something higher and stronger, where you have a preference is more subjective, and it means something different to somebody else, or it can slide and it can move within within whatever the weather of the day is, right? So you can have somebody that is a fan favorite of the leadership team, but yet they have the most atrocious attendance and nobody says or does anything about it. But yet you have a solid employee that people don’t necessarily recognize as being a strong individual. They show up late once and then they get wonked on. That’s an idea of a preference, right? In other words, they’re not taking that step back to say, wait a minute, are we in alignment? with who we say we are, or are we just kind of rolling with, you know, the feelings of the day?

Hugh Ballou:
The feelings of the day. I think that’s, in my world, a core value is a single word that can be interpreted like you said. It can be interpreted subjectively, but a guiding principle has more meat around it. It identifies how you, and a lot of times, sometimes it’s how you apply that principle in making decisions or in performance. So this is, the underlying piece here is those things cause what we call conflict. And I see leaders being, even the power leaders I work with in multinational corporations, They don’t want to intervene. And so it’s not addressing that situation upfront. So we’ve really reframed the word conflict, which technically means with your front. So it doesn’t necessarily mean negative. So what are some of the ways that dealers don’t deal with conflict that make it worse?

Brenda Neckvatal:
So there’s really, there’s two, you call that one of the types of conflict, you’ve got a productive conflict, right? So you’ve got conflict where you have two people that have opposing views, but yet are very willing to come together and figure out how to get to the answer, right? They’re both trying to solve the same problem, but from two different angles. And you know what, that’s fantastic. That’s collaboration at its best. Sometimes can it get heated? Yeah, but it’s always focused on the best interest of the project and not the individual. And then you have deconstructed conflict, which is the kind where everybody, like the parties are attached emotionally Like there’s, they’re not willing to consider anything else because in their mind that is the best situation as the best angle for it, but that’s usually tied to there’s something else behind the scenes, meaning that. If we go the other route, that means that my job is either on the line or it’s going to cost more for me to do, or it’s going to screw something up on my end and people aren’t taking that into consideration. And now what’s happening is that the ego is now involved in the discussion, right? That’s what it is. So leaders don’t step in for a wide variety of reasons. One reason is that What could be a problem to somebody else is not necessarily a problem in the eyes of that leader. And there’s a reason for that. So I’ll give you a, for instance, what I’m talking about and stay with me on the ego mindset. Okay. So a leader, a CEO, high level. leader, like the CEO owns every problem in the company. They’re not the ones that solve every problem, but they own it 100%. That could be the business owner, that could be the elected leader, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Even within the nonprofit, the executive director owns every single issue in the organization, but they have people in place who are supposed to be handling that, right? So if somebody, let’s say, for example, a receptionist comes in and says, Listen, every time something happens here, this is the outcome of it and I need your help to do it. The leader may not necessarily look at that person’s problem in the same light. because their problems are, do we have the right people in place to take the organization to the next level? Do we have enough of the right revenue coming in or the right financial impact coming in so that we can take it to the next level? And do we have the appropriate processes in place for us to go ahead and take it to the next level? So they’re thinking very, very high level, 30,000 feet, where you might have that one receptionist where they see it as an issue with the job. or a minor violation of something or something that’s out of alignment or out of agreement, but that’s not something that hits the bigger picture. So a leader may say, this is not something that is worth my time because I’m five minutes late to my next meeting and that’s $100,000 donation. That’s not the immediate problem of the moment. So they may not necessarily address it. They may not come back to it because they’re thinking of bigger things. But for that one person, that impacts them. So in some ways, it could be ego driven. It likely isn’t because all they’re looking at is their 5,000 foot level issue compared to a 30,000 foot issue. So that’s one reason why a leader may not necessarily address something, and especially if it doesn’t align with the number one objective of the organization, right? So I had a boss, he was absolutely fantastic. And when we worked together, we were at CarMax, people would say, hey, listen, I have an idea about something. And he would say, stop for a second. He goes, before you say it, is it going to help us sell more cars? And they said, well, no. And he said, then it’s not the right thing for us to focus in on. Now, that was two things. Number one, it was keeping him and all the problems that could potentially come up. kind of in a box so problems don’t runneth over right so it was containment but at the other side too he was starting to train people to think in that way so then when they would come up with an idea and they say hey hey we got an idea oh and by the way it’s going to help us sell more cars he goes okay great let’s focus in on that so that way they were using his time well and he was actually teaching them how to do that and then you have other individuals that quite frankly they just don’t know what to say or there’s something inside of them where they’re hesitant to get involved because they don’t want to make the situation worse. It may be something that, believe it or not, like leadership, you can get pummeled pretty good being a leader and you may have some little minor PTSD. You’re carrying something from the past that you haven’t yet quite gone past, healed from, hadn’t addressed yet, and now it seems to be repeating and you won’t have anything to do with it, right? There’s a wide multitude of reasons. And then there’s also Other reasons, too, that a leader may not necessarily want to get involved because they are going to require their team to actually figure it out for themselves. Have them go through the hard stuff. They’re setting the expectation. This is one of mine, that when my employees come up to me and now they say, well, Susie’s doing this and blah, blah, blah, blah. And now I see that I’ve got a conflict between the two of them. I have historically always sat them down and said, listen, We’re grownups here and I expect you to sort this out for yourself. I am not here to regulate and to babysit your relationships. I expect you guys to figure this out, come up with a solution. And then I would leave it at that. And it was up to them, two fully able-bodied grownups to figure that out. So there’s a lot of reasons why people may or may not address something. It kind of depends on the leader and the circumstance and what the beliefs are around it.

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah. Psychologist Dr. Joseph Howell writes about becoming conscious and realizing where your ego is steering you and learning not to let your life be run by your ego. And I mentioned psychiatrist Mary Bowen writes about differentiation of self. Both of these to me are about managing self. And so, in your website, you talk about emotional intelligence. So, in what you’re describing, we get bit by the emotion and we go away from our thinking brain into our emotional reacting. So, talk about that and then talk a little bit about what you teach about emotional intelligence.

Brenda Neckvatal:
Yeah. So, when we’re faced with anything, something that makes us a little concerned. We may have some fear towards it. There’s ambiguity. It’s pressure. It’s something stressing. What happens is that our line of sight starts to close in on us. And the only thing that we can see is down that, now that pipeline, right? Something is frustrating us. And we know it when it happens, because we feel like we’re owned by it suddenly. Well, what we have to remember, and this takes time, it takes practice, and it takes discipline, is that when we’re starting to go down that way, where we go from a vision of this to this, is that we have to remember that we have to open that aperture up because we have to lead beyond what we see immediately in front of us and what we’re instantly feeling. And so that is emotional intelligence towards yourself. And there are, Reasons why people can stumble and fall when it comes to exercising emotional intelligence with other people is because they haven’t yet dealt with whatever it is that’s inside of them. Some people, their skin is way thicker than most, or you have people that are thinner skinned than most. There’s a level of tolerance that we have for what people say. There are people in this world that get easily offended by things. Well, there’s stuff that comes with that. right? There’s history and there’s baggage that comes with that. Then there are people that, like, you can’t even bounce a quarter off of them and make a dent, you know? But the ones that are the most successful, and I have a really great example of this, are the ones that are able to recognize when they’ve now crossed a line and they go, whoa, wait a minute. So My pastor at church, my pastor is six foot seven. His wife is five two. He is an absolute giant. I know, right? And he is like super, super fit. And he’ll tell us like, when we get into an argument, all of a sudden I start hearing myself and I go, whoa, I do not like how I’m being. And he pumps those brakes, right? And it’s self-awareness. So emotional intelligence really is a form of self-awareness of how you are inflicting, imposing, being on or towards somebody, and whether or not you are being productive or destructive. And it’s one of those things that’s pretty amazing because you can shift just like that. You can take the negative and you can make a positive. You can take the positive and you can take it at the same time. So emotional intelligence is very fluid.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. That’s something that’s probably invisible to a lot of people.

Brenda Neckvatal:
It can be. Yeah. When you sit down and you start to examine it and you really start to kind of peel back the layers of your own individual onion, like if you’re facing a problem, honestly, look in the mirror first to see if it’s there. If it’s looking right back at you, not a lot of people are willing to do that. And again, that’s where the ego comes in is that there’s some pride that exists there as well.

Hugh Ballou:
Now there’s some myths about non-profit leadership, like the whole bunch of you can’t, you can’t, you can’t. And so having served in large organizations for years, I’ve fired volunteers. And most of the time they’ve been happy about it, because they didn’t know how to tell me it wasn’t working. And they felt like they were letting me down. So I said, you know, this isn’t working out. And they were like, oh, happy. But sometimes the leaders just don’t want to step up and deal with the situation. How does that make it worse?

Brenda Neckvatal:
Well, probably this would fall back on my number one live and die rule, I would say. And that is in the absence of information, people make stuff up. So when people don’t understand why a decision has been made or why a decision hasn’t been made, human beings were not wired to accept emptiness, like we’re not wired to accept that level of ambiguity, so what do we do? We fill that void with a story, and if you don’t believe me, watch an 11-year-old girl have a crush on a boy for the very first time in her life, or watch a woman date in her 30s and have a guy not show up, because it’s the same thing, and I’ve been both, so I can say it, so we start filling in the blank, like, oh, he said he was going to call me and I haven’t heard from him. Maybe he’s stuck on dead on the side of the road somewhere. Maybe he lost the number. Maybe he’s really busy. Or maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, right? So we start filling in these blanks. Everybody does this. This isn’t just women in 32 and 11. But we all do this, right? It’s the most relevant example I can come up with. And so like, for instance, somebody at work or a volunteer might get promoted to another level. And there’s another volunteer who’s been there longer or has been doing something that they think that they have now matched that person, but they weren’t the one selected. Now they’re a little bent out of shape because there’s no information for them to fall back on. So now they’re like, well, they got it and I didn’t because I just don’t think Bob really likes me. Well, may not have anything to do with like, but now we have to fill that void with a description of some kind to satisfy our ego, to satisfy the insecurity, to satisfy the concern, the worry or whatever it is, instead of just saying, oh, well, that’s awesome. You got a promotion. Great. I’m going to go over here and go back to doing what I’m doing. So, you know, we all have desires. Well, some of us want more attention than others. We are all so individual and so unique, but the behaviors tend to be very similar. And it all will stem from the fulfillment of the ego. And the ego is not a bad thing. It’s there to protect us. It’s how we exist in the world. Or it could just simply be a miscommunication, or somebody wasn’t communicated enough to. And now all of a sudden, you’re either going down the rabbit hole and having a tea party with Alice and the rabbit and the Mad Hatter, or you’re just If that person has got a level of maturity to them, they can say, there’s probably more to this than I’m not aware of. And that’s OK.

Hugh Ballou:
And that would be staying in your thinking brain just to think it through. Yeah. And you know, when there’s conflict and my psychologist colleagues tell me everybody contributes. So we want to blame other people. And well, you know, what’s my role. I like that. I agree with you when there’s a vacuum, people make up things and it’s more often wrong than it is correct. So 90% of the time.

Brenda Neckvatal:
Yeah.

Hugh Ballou:
Your website is your name, right?

Brenda Neckvatal:
Yes. Brenda neck bottle.com.

Hugh Ballou:
N-E-C-K-V-A-T-A-L. And Brenda, there’s no spaces or dashes, brendanecvato.com. What will people find? And there’s some people listening can’t see it. So what will people find when they go there?

Brenda Neckvatal:
Oh my gosh, you’re gonna find quite a bit of information. I have a lot of resources within my website. One of the things that when you land on it, the very first thing you’ll see is if you want to take on a fantastic challenge to your leadership, in other words, you want to solve issues, you want to take your leadership to the next level, you want to invest in yourself a little bit without spending any money, I have what’s called a 30-day trust challenge. And the thing is about leadership is that you cannot lead unless you build trust. So there is a link, as soon as you land on the page, where you’ll see it in blue, it says a 30 day trust challenge. And what it is, is you watch a daily little sniglet of a video from me on escalating or taking your trust to the next level. And I have people that have been going through this. It’s a fantastic challenge. It gives you little things that you can do to take trust to the next level. So it’s one day, one action, one step closer to the leader that people really, truly, honestly want to follow. And this stuff isn’t theory. This stuff is real. These are the things that I have been coaching and helping other leaders solve and figure out. They’re also a lot based on a lot of the experiences that I went through, because I was starting off as a leader. I didn’t grow up with a mentor. I had bosses, you know, I’m a Gen Xer. And, you know, my first day on the job was, this is what you’re gonna do. This is how you’re gonna do it. This is when you’re gonna do it. And if you don’t like it, don’t let it hit, there’s the door, don’t let it hit you in the butt on the way out. You know, so we had to figure that stuff out. It’s certainly not like it is today. But, you know, I didn’t have, of somebody that said, hey, you may wanna consider approaching somebody this way. It was like, just get it done, figure it out. So what happens is that you do your best, you make a lot of mistakes, but if you don’t have the second half of that, which is the coaching, the guidance, the soundboard, the person that calls you out on your bad moves, that mentor, you’re going to be addressing the same, if not old problem with the same and old mindset. So the only way you can address a new problem or get to a new level is by a refreshed and new mindset. And the confidence doesn’t come in the thinking about it, the confidence comes in the doing. Your confidence will follow when you get out there, because failure is our greatest teacher. Failure is what forges our confidence. It’s not what rips us down. And you have to change that mindset. So the 30-Day Trust Challenge is very much about that. It is putting yourself in a position of doing, feeling like you’re a little louder on the skinny branches. But when you do it, you’re starting to make micro moves to either repair something that you know or don’t know is broken or connect more with the people, not in a kumbaya way, but in a way that they can say, hey, listen, I can really follow this person because this person is demonstrating to me the qualities that are earnest, honest, noble when it comes to being a leader.

Hugh Ballou:
So what bit of wisdom do you want to leave people with today?

Brenda Neckvatal:
Oh, I gave you some of my good ones. I gave you some. Oh, here’s a good one. This is one of my favorite ones. And this is, I actually keep this one up on my screen. If you want to progress as a leader to the next level, individually, personally as an individual, you have to make sure that you, you have to start either leading by gratitude or you have to do the forgiveness thing. because there is no such thing as a justified resentment. You are never going to move forward in anything in life if you think you have what’s called a justified resentment. No resentment is justified. You’re going to have to put something to bed.

Hugh Ballou:
Yes, Brenda, wise words today. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with our audience today on The Nonprofit Exchange.