I just need some tips to get me through. I've been put in a team where I am working very closely with someone I absolutely cannot stand. It's a full time role and the project will be ongoing for 7 months. I know this post will.make me sound absolutely dreadful but I promise you, I'm not. This person has an incredibly demoralising, toxic influence on the entire team.
For context, I am a pretty easy going person, tend to find a way to get along with most types of personalities and think I'm a sensitive person with strong social skills. I'm generally empathetic, try to always see the good in people and believe that everyone deserves a chance. I'm good at my job and am a good team player, going by feedback from other colleagues through the years. Everyone seems to like working with me. Not bragging but setting the scene.
This person drives me to absolute distraction. I don't want to go too much into detail but he a) cannot do the job to anything more than a passable standard- on a good day (!) and b) is very emotionally unstable and pretty much all over the place. He is in the job due to nepotism from a previous manager who has now left, and new management is aware of his issues. I don't know the details but suspect he is being managed out, but that the project MUST be completed with him on the team (many reasons which are too outing to explain).
So he is on the way out, but I have to work very closely with him. I pass along all of the work related issues that I have to fix to mgmt, but aside from that I have to work alongside him and I find him to be incredibly intense, very unpredictable (some days he is full of ideas, other days he seems totally despondent). He gets things about the project confused/wrong but gets very angry or upset when anyone corrects him. He makes lots of silly mistakes and it's really tiring finding a way to tell him without setting him off or having to redo things without him noticing and taking offence.
As i said, management is dealing with the competence issue separately, as far as I know, but I know there are contractual issues which means that he has to see the project through. I've to work with him for 7 months and I just find him completely infuriating. Everyone does. I've snapped at him a few times in a way I've never done before with any colleague in my life and I dread going to work every day. I can't work from home due to the nature of the role.
I feel like I absorb a lot of his energy and constantly feel low and stressed when I always had good mental health before. I come home with a headache just from the tension of being in his company-everything seems so full of drama, hot and cold, and yet he still wants us to be friendly and for everything to be cool between us. At the beginning of new team structure (2 months ago) I felt really sorry for him and worried about his mental health but now I'm worried for my own, after 8 weeks!
I've actually started seeing a counsellor to help me handle working alongside him. He doesn't bully me or do anything sexually inappropriate but he just constantly seems like he is on the brink of some kind of mental breakdown and it's gruesome to watch. I feel sucked into it and wish he would ho away. I know he is already on a support pathway for his mental health problems but I'm struggling. Sometimes I think he is on a lot of medication and it can be difficult getting through to him.
I know I sound very callous but he has caused a lot of damage to colleagues in the past, messing up their projects and blaming his problems for the mistakes. He always got away with it as he was related to the previous boss. One previous colleague left to company because of him and nothing was ever done.
I don't know how to get through each day. He is so toxic but sees himself as the victim who just never got a break. It's awful. I've done everything and passed along my concerns according to all of the procedures and think management are carefully doing the same.
There is just an awful interim period until the project ends and I don't know how to get through it.
Help.