What actually helps when a colleague keeps missing what everyone else in the room can feel.
Hello friends,
A few years ago, in a marketing meeting at a company I worked for, the timeline had been too tight from the start. Everyone in the room had known it going in. Nobody had said so out loud. Weeks in, it had turned into a real problem, and the frustration in the room was real too. So when someone finally said it, plainly, you could feel the room exhale. Finally. Someone said it.
Then a colleague, usually sharp, useful, respected, reacted badly. He got irritated, moved straight to solutions, and in the process made it sound like the rest of us just hadn't managed our time well. He was also, as it happened, the person who had pushed for that exact deadline in the first place, and he wasn't feeling the pressure of it the way the rest of the team was.
Nobody in that room needed solutions in that exact minute. They needed someone to say, yes, this has been hard, before we talk about what's next. He didn't see it. Not because he didn't care. He just couldn't read what the room actually needed.
I've thought about that meeting a lot since I started training teams in emotional intelligence. Because almost every team I work with has one version of that colleague, the one everyone secretly avoids putting in a room with a client. And the question people usually bring me isn't "how do I fix them." It's quieter than that: "how do I keep working with this person without losing my own mind."
When you notice something is off
Most of us treat a colleague's lack of emotional intelligence as something to fix or endure. Neither works well. Trying to fix them puts you in an unpaid coaching role nobody asked you to take. Enduring it means you're absorbing the emotional labour of the whole room, translating, softening, cleaning up after conversations that went badly, while they have no idea any of that happened.
But there's a third option we tend to skip past too quickly: you can just say something. Not a lecture, not a diagnosis. Something closer to what I try to do myself now: "I think, like you also mentioned, in that moment we actually needed a bit of time. Going forward, it would mean a lot if you could build that in." One sentence, naming the past moment and asking for something specific next time. Meetings are allowed to be talked about after they happen. Most of us just never learned that.
Why we stay quiet instead
A few real reasons, and none of them mean you're too sensitive.
Naming it out loud feels risky, even when you say it kindly. Most of us would rather sit with the discomfort ourselves than risk the conversation.
The colleague usually can't see the gap at all. From where they're standing, the meeting went fine, the deadline got mentioned, job done.
And organisations often reward exactly the wrong instinct. Moving fast and stating things plainly reads as decisive. Noticing what a room needs almost never shows up on a performance review.
There's also a fact worth saying out loud: we already know people leave managers, not companies. In the teams I train, I see the same pattern with colleagues. Someone who takes up too much space in every meeting, who never notices when someone else needs to speak, can make a person feel unseen often enough that they start looking for the door long before anyone else notices why.
What actually helps
Speak up. Either directly with the person, in one clear sentence like the one above, or with someone else in the company if a direct conversation doesn't feel possible right now: your manager, HR, someone you trust. You don't have to carry this alone, and you don't have to solve it in silence either.
Get curious before you get frustrated. Most people who miss the room aren't malicious. They might be under real pressure themselves, or they learned early in their career that stating facts fast gets rewarded. Curiosity doesn't excuse the impact. It keeps you from writing someone off, which usually backfires anyway.
And decide what's actually yours to carry. You can name something once, clearly, and ask for something different going forward. What you can't do is manage someone else's self-awareness for them long term. At some point it becomes less about fixing the gap and more about protecting your own energy. If you want help figuring out what that looks like in your specific situation, feel free to reach out, I'm always glad to think it through with someone.
The reframe that helps me most: I used to think my job, in any room, was to make sure everyone felt okay. It took me a long time to separate that from actually being responsible for how someone else shows up. I can name what I notice. I can't donate my own emotional intelligence to someone who hasn't built theirs yet.
Where this leaves us
If you're the one who always notices, who softens things after a colleague says the blunt version, who leaves meetings replaying what you should have said, I want to be honest with you about something.
There is another way of holding this. Not a script for the perfect confrontation, not a personality transplant for your colleague. Just a steadier relationship to your own reaction, and the willingness to actually say something, once, clearly, instead of carrying it alone. I've watched leadership teams practise exactly this, slowly, over eight weeks, and watched the room change less because the difficult colleague transformed overnight, and more because everyone else stopped absorbing what wasn't theirs to absorb.
You're not too sensitive. You're not imagining the gap. Don't let your working life get worn down by someone else's blind spot. Speak up, once, clearly, and it's genuinely okay to set a boundary after that. 🫰
Have a lovely day,
P.S. Naming what's actually happening in a room, honestly and without blame, is Module 7, Undeniable Speaking, of our 8-week Emotional Intelligence in Action programme. Discovery Call is at cal.com/sophie-bachmann/discovery-call when you're ready.