How do you try to put yourself or someone else into a team which is hard to get along with?

In my last role, I had to work with an infrastructure team that people on my team described as hard to get along with because they were very strict about requests and often pushed back. Instead of assuming they were just being difficult, I asked a teammate who had worked with them before and learned they supported a fragile system and were dealing with frequent incidents. When I needed their help, I rewrote my request with a clear example, what I had already tried, and a couple of options instead of just asking them to fix it. I also set up a short chat rather than continuing a confusing message thread. That changed the tone a lot, and we were able to agree on a small safe change that solved my issue. After that, I used the same approach on future requests and got much faster, smoother responses from them.

In a previous role I had to work closely with the customer support team, who were known for being defensive about product changes. Rather than pushing features at them, I asked to sit in their daily triage for a week so I could hear their recurring issues and learn their constraints. I made a point to ask questions that clarified their needs, then volunteered to fix a small, non-urgent pain — rewriting a confusing error message and updating the help doc — and delivered it within a day. Because I followed through and communicated before making the change, they started treating me as someone who understands their problems and we began getting them involved earlier in planning.