Working with Difficult People

Everyone's work day is filled with them--people who frustrate, impede, maneuver, undermine, plot, connive, and whine. This top communications consultant details specific techniques for handling all of them. Easy-to-follow scenarios for every situation are featured in this handy guide.

Have you ever agonized over how to handle a bully in the workplace--with pie-in-the-face retribution or a saintly smile? "The 100 people you'll meet on these pages," Muriel Solomon teases in her introduction to this hard-hitting and entertaining guidebook, "should be founding members of E.O.O.--Equal Opportunity Offenders. They show no bias. They are as obnoxious to their bosses as they are to their bookkeepers." But the teasing segues into practical advice for those seeking to do their work in--if not kind circumstances--at least unthreatening ones.

Designed as an at-a-glance reference tool, this 10-part guide describes 10 kinds of culprits, from tyrants, bullies, and sadists to the pushy and presumptuous to connivers and camouflagers. Each type is first defined, allowing for a peek inside the heads of both victim and victimizer and offering a helpful strategy for facilitating tactful dialogues that serves as excellent advice for diffusing workplace tensions and hostilities.

You may recognize these types as thorns in your side or--worse--real threats to your sense of well-being and work performance. This reference book packs a wallop, not only restoring your self-esteem but allowing you to create better relationships with the people at work who make your life miserable. Working with Difficult People may not disarm the despicable, but it will supply you with the ammunition you need to put the control back in your camp.