I’ll never forget my experience with a truly bad colleague. The warning signs were there but I just didn’t believe them.

I was part of a team of people who interviewed her before she was hired. She impressed me — experienced, intelligent, knowledgeable, and witty.  With no reservations, I recommended that she be hired. To my boss’s dismay, she turned down the job. A couple of months later, however, she was back. She said she had made a mistake, that the position (it was still open!) was indeed a good fit and asked us to renew the offer we’d made. My boss was hesitant but I felt so strongly that she was a great choice that I talked him into it.

Things were fine for a while. Then we started to work together on a client engagement she was leading because it was squarely in her area of expertise. Part of the project included interviewing client senior executives regarding the Company’s strategy, current situation as well as learning more about the challenges they faced. She agreed to create “interview guides” that we would both use so that the approach we used to gather data would be consistent as well as the data itself. She failed to deliver and when I told her I was concerned that I didn’t have the experience to “wing it”, she assured me that I could observe as she conducted the first few sessions so that I could learn the methodology. Not wanting to make waves, I agreed.

We were scheduled to fly to the client site on a Sunday afternoon. It was a miserable day, you know the kind that almost guarantees hours of airport delays. My colleague called me at home that morning to tell me that she wasn’t feeling well and would be unable to make the trip. I asked her to talk me through the process she had planned to use but she wasn’t very helpful. Hmmmm….

When it became clear that I was on my own, I made the best of the situation (yes, the plane was very late) and muddled through the interviews. When she and I met to analyze the data and write the report, she was quick to point out that I had failed to ask certain questions that were, in her opinion, essential to be included in the report. As an overachiever, I was disappointed in myself; the experience left me feeling less confident and less competent. It took me a long time to get over it

When I think back about what I learned from this most unpleasant experience, there were several “takeaways”:

Trust your gut.

Just because someone is likable doesn’t mean they are trustworthy. If a colleague fails to support you even once, don’t expect her to magically change her ways the next time. And don’t think that you can take loyalty for granted; some people simply don’t have the loyalty character trait.

Give yourself a break.

You can’t expect to know how to do certain tasks without the requisite training or experience. It doesn’t mean you aren’t intelligent or hardworking, it simply means you haven’t had the support you need.

When it’s a serious situation, escalate the problem.

Don’t try to be a heroine; you can’t solve every problem by yourself. Ask senior leaders for help when you need it. That’s what they are there for,

While sabotage goes on in workplaces all over the world regardless of economic circumstances, things can get even dicier when people feel threatened. The end of the story about my nemesis is that she had far less experience than she claimed to have. She was protecting herself at my expense. These days it seems there’s a lot of that going on.

More on this topic in The Wall Street Journal and in this month’s issue of Harvard Business Review (my fabulous colleague, Deborah Kolb, contributes her perspective in HBR Case Study “When Your Colleague Is a Saboteur”).

TAGS: Building workplace relationships, career derailment, colleagues, difficult economy, gaining confidence, sabotage, Women at Work