Coping with Toxic Managers, Subordinates ... and Other Difficult People: Using Emotional Intelligence to Survive and Prosper

From Booklist
Lubit, an academic, psychiatrist, and management consultant, explains how our ability to work effectively with difficult or "toxic" managers will have a significant impact on our careers. By improving this ability, he claims, we will learn to better understand and manage ourselves. The first order is to increase our emotional intelligence, comprising personal and social competence. These competencies are our abilities to understand our own feelings, strengths, and weaknesses, and to control our emotions while also understanding the feelings of others and developing skills to form positive relationships with them. Lubit delineates the behaviors of five types of toxic managers--narcissistic, unethical, aggressive, rigid, and impaired--saying that these behaviors are manifestations of depression and fear. By understanding them, we will be able to design strategies to protect ourselves. While this reads like a textbook, the author has valuable insight to share with those in today's business world who are dealing with--or who may someday deal with--a toxic manager. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description

Some people are toxic: narcissistic, aggressive, inflexible, unethical, ready to scapegoat, capable of transforming any workplace into an unending nightmare. How do you cope with such individuals, while protecting both your career AND your sanity? Simplistic, cookie-cutter solutions don't work. In Coping with Toxic Managers, world-renowned psychiatrist and organizational consultant Roy Lubit shows you techniques that will. Drawing on his extensive experience as both a mental health professional and an organizational consultant for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Lubit offers concrete, proven advice for subordinates, colleagues and superiors alike. You learn what's really driving your toxic manager or subordinate... how to cope with the emotional stress of dealing with them... and how to create a strategy that reflects their individual personality, while drawing on today's powerful new insights into emotional intelligence. The technicques Lubit teaches apply to personal relationships with toxic individuals as well.

From the Back Cover

In any organization, recognizing and understanding the nature and impact of toxic behaviors can provide for the ability to manage the adverse environment and mitigate the potential risks that we often face in the workplace. In Coping with Toxic Managers, Roy Lubit skillfully tackles this complicated topic by presenting the psychological aspects of toxic behaviors in a manner that is understandable and embraceable. This is not one of those 'flavor of the month' pop-psychology books—it's truly about the science of how and why toxic people think, act, and react. Read this book and you may start looking at the people in your organization quite differently.—Michael Chuchmuch, V.P. Business Transformation and Change Management, UNISYS Corporation

I found this book to be right on the mark and learned a lot from it. Lubit understands the problems people in business face from difficult people above and below them and comes up with very insightful and practical ways to deal effectively with the situations. If all of my managers read this book they would do their jobs better. —Jeff Schindler, President and CEO, Etronics

Executives, and the senior HR officers who counsel them, struggle every day with how to deal with toxic leaders, the ones who try to achieve high performance by abusing, intimidating, mistreating, and demeaning their subordinates. Finally someone has written a book on how to handle the various types of corporate ax murderers, how to help them develop, and when to let them go. —Michael Feiner, Professor, Columbia Business School; formerly Sr. V.P. and Chief People Officer for Pepsi-Cola worldwide

Roy Lubit's new book is an exciting breakthrough for anyone who has ever had a boss! It's hard to remember that bosses are only people. This book helps you understand what makes them tick, their different styles, how you can manage them effectively from below, and how to get everyone working on the same team. Lubit's secret ingredient is his incisive knowledge of how people and organizations work. A must read! —Jeffrey P. Kahn, M.D., President, WorkPsych Associates, Inc.; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Cornell University; and former President, Academy of Occupational and Organizational Psychiatry

To lead and manage effectively, we need to understand the people with whom we work. Coping with Toxic Managers, Subordinates and Other Difficult People is an excellent and thorough book containing crucial insights into why managers behave as they do, and how to cope with different types of people. It will not only help you to understand and better deal with toxic managers, but it will also help you work with yourself and with the normal vulnerabilities of managers with whom you work everyday. —Ronald A. Heifetz, Co-Founder, Center for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Many managers engage in destructive behavior that does considerable harm to their subordinates, their organization, and eventually themselves. Whether they are narcissistic, unethical, rigid, or aggressive, working with them can be a nightmare. In Coping with Toxic Managers, psychiatrist and organizational consultant Dr. Roy H. Lubit shows you how to develop your emotional intelligence and protect yourself and your organization from the destructive impact of toxic managers.

Drawing on his extensive experience as both a mental health professional and organizational consultant to Fortune 500 firms and large law firms, Dr. Lubit offers concrete advice as well as a way to better understand with whom you are dealing.

The basic premise of the book is that the better you understand how specific types of toxic managers view the world and what motivates them, the better you will be able to influence them to behave in ways that enable you to do your work and survive your hours at work. To borrow a phrase, this is not pop psych advice, it is sophisticated advice served quickly and understandably.Handling narcissistic managers. What to do when your manager thinks she's the center of the universe. What senior management can do to recognize narcissistic managers early in their careers.Dealing with unethical managers. How subordinates can avoid becoming accomplices and how senior management can decide whether to reform or fire them.Handling rigid managers. Understanding the different factors that can lie underneath rigid behavior and how to cope with each of them.Dealing with aggressive managers. Practical techniques for handling a variety of aggressive behaviors: when to push back, when to submit, and when to head for the hills.The impaired manager. Coping with anxious, depressed, obsessive, bipolar, and chemically dependent managers. Appreciating when one of these underlies aggressive, rigid, or narcissistic behavior, and what to do.Using emotional intelligence to develop your career and your organization. How organizations can recognize toxic managers early and decide whether to attempt to reform them or simply fire them. How to create an organization that limits toxic behavior. A guide for improving your ability to cope with the stress of dealing with toxic managers.

About the Author

Dr. Roy H. Lubit trained in psychiatry at Yale, wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on organizational learning at Harvard, researched organizational behavior at Columbia Business School, and taught organizational behavior at the City University of New York's Zicklin School of Business. He is a senior consultant to the Center for Social and Emotional Education and a member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.

His professional training and extensive experience in both psychotherapy and organizational dynamics are very unusual. Many people are trained in one of these areas and do some work in the other. Deep involvement in both provides a foundation for unique insights.

Dr. Lubit coaches executives; runs leadership workshops; consults to corporations, governmental agencies, and law firms on a variety of organizational issues; and conducts research on fostering emotional intelligence. Dr. Lubit has appeared widely on TV and radio and presented numerous times at professional conferences.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This book is written forPeople who must deal with narcissistic, unethical, aggressive, rigid, depressed, or anxious individuals and want to know how to more effectively manage the situation.Senior managers and human resource professionals who are concerned about toxic managerial behavior in their organization.Those who want to enhance their interpersonal skills and advance their career.

Toxic managers dot the landscape in most organizations making them feel, at times, like war zones. These managers can complicate your work, drain your energy, compromise your sanity and destroy your career. You may not yet have been subjected to aggressive, manipulative, unethical, rigid, or narcissistic behavior by bosses or subordinates. If so, count yourself lucky. In time, however, you will almost certainly experience such behavior.

Your ability to deal with difficult managers will have a significant impact on your career. The knowledge you gain from reading this book will help you to deal with them and to avoid letting them derail your projects and your career. This book will help you learn how to recognize toxic managers sooner so that you will be better able to protect yourself. You will develop your understanding of what makes them tick so that you can more effectively design a course of action to deal with their destructive behavior. Some managers are toxic because they are clueless about their effect on others; some are toxic because they do not care if they hurt others; some are toxic because they enjoy hurting others; and some are toxic because they are simply overwhelmed with stress. You will learn how to avoid becoming a scapegoat, how to survive aggressive managers' assaults, and how to give narcissistic and rigid managers the things they need to be satisfied with you. This book can also help you to recognize toxic behavior in yourself, to realize its impact on others, and to contain it.

First and foremost, this book is designed to increase the emotional intelligence of the reader. By helping the reader to understand different types of difficult personalities and suggesting ways to more effectively deal with them, it will improve the reader's social competence. For those who are brave enough to recognize difficult behavior in themselves, it will increase their personal competence as well.

The last chapter provides a toolkit for developing your emotional intelligence, shielding yourself from some of the pain toxic managers generally cause, and for senior management and human resources to better protect their organization from the destructive impact of toxic managers.

This book is designed to be easy to understand. No prior knowledge of psychology is needed. It provides concrete, easy-to-follow solutions to ameliorate the impact of toxic behavior. It also provides a sophisticated understanding of why people behave in destructive ways. Understanding the motivations for toxic behavior is not a sidelight. The basic premise of the book is that understanding the different types of toxic managers and the different motivations that can drive a certain type of toxic behavior is crucial to selecting an effective way to cope.

The stories in this book are, unfortunately, true. The names and identifying details have been changed to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. These are events I witnessed or was told about by those who experienced them. I did not use examples from my work as a therapist and executive coach.For Senior Managers, HR, and Professionals

This book will be of interest to senior management and human resources as well as to those with a difficult superior. It is built on an understanding of organizational dynamics and the business environment. It discusses how rigid, unethical, and aggressive behaviors affect productivity and retention and explores what HR and senior management can do to contain this behavior in their organization. In addition, by helping the reader to understand different personality types it enables managers to more effectively motivate, persuade, and develop all of the individuals they work with. The more you can tailor your management style to each individual, the more success both you and those who report to you will have.

Many researchers on organizational productivity and success have argued that the key to success lies not in having the perfect strategy, nor in being in the right industry, nor in having an ideal change management plan, nor in charismatic leadership. Rather, the key to success is growing your human resources. Jim Collins writes in Good to Great: "We expected to find that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and then the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it." Charles O'Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer in Hidden Value discuss how companies have gotten extraordinary results out of ordinary people and how this is the key to success in today's economy.

These researchers focus attention on the crucial role of leadership concentrating on the organization's values and culture. These are very important. But, there is another crucial part of the equation that is less talked about: dealing with the toxic managers who damage the productivity of those under them and above them. Toxic managers interfere with the development of social capital and with the ability and desire of people to trust each other and to be willing to go out of their way for each other. Social capital is very important in improving productivity. In addition to motivating and guiding workers through a strong culture, companies need to remove the obstacles to their performance by decreasing the toxic behavior they face and improving their skills to deal with difficult bosses. Intensive efforts in this area are as yet an unexplored but potentially fruitful area for organizational improvement. It holds tremendous potential for unlocking blocked productivity and for improving the company's ability to hire and retain the best people. Working on the company's culture is an important lever in improving how people treat each other. It is not, however, the only lever. The book discusses many different levers to building organizations in which people can grow and give their best.Outline of this Book

This book is divided into five parts:Part I—Narcissistic managersPart II—Unethical ManagersPart III—Aggressive ManagersPart IV—Rigid ManagersPart V—Impaired ManagersPart VI—Developing and Harnessing Emotional Intelligence

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Many managers engage in destructive behavior that does considerable harm to their subordinates, their organization, and eventually themselves. Whether they are narcissistic, unethical, rigid, or aggressive, working with them can be a nightmare. In Coping with Toxic Managers, psychiatrist and organizational consultant Dr. Roy H. Lubit shows you how to develop your emotional intelligence and protect yourself and your organization from the destructive impact of toxic managers.

Drawing on his extensive experience as both a mental health professional and organizational consultant to Fortune 500 firms and large law firms, Dr. Lubit offers concrete advice as well as a way to better understand with whom you are dealing.