Survival Guide for Working with Humans, A: Dealing with Whiners, Back-Stabbers, Know-It-Alls, and Other Difficult

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Between dealing with difficult people and navigating through unexpected and complicated situations, the typical day at the office involves making countless choices on how to engage with others. To succeed in the long run, good work relationships must be carefully developed and maintained.

A Survival Guide for Working with Humans presents real-life scenarios of specific work relationship problems, along with interactive quizzes, and answers on how to solve each of the problems. The book shows readers how to:

* Deal with ethical dilemmas in the workplace
* Resolve everyday conflicts
* Know when to speak up, when not to, and what to say
* Make a graceful retreat from an unwinnable confrontation

A snappy, conversational style combines with dozens of practical tools and examples to make a fascinating, essential book.

About the Author:Gini Graham Scott, Ph.D. (Oakland, CA) is the founder and director of Changemakers and Creative Communications & Research. She is the author of 35 books, including Work with Me!: Resolving Everyday Conflict in Your Organization. She wrote the Work it Right! column, upon which this book is based, for the Oakland Tribune.

SYNOPSIS

Everyone has had one--a colleague or client who makes going to work a trial and a terror. Scott, a Bay Area consultant, provides chatty guidance for reducing workplace difficulties and improving morale. Her approach mixes problem-solving and conflict-resolution techniques with methods such as visualization, mental gymnastics, and intuitive reasoning to determine a course of action. Her anecdote-based narrative includes quizzes, profiles of common personality types, and problem and conflict scenarios. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Dealing With Whiners and Other Difficult People
To succeed in the workplace, good work relationships must be carefully developed and maintained. Although difficult people, back stabbers, whiners, know-it-alls and others can make it hard to get through the workweek, there are many coping mechanisms that can be put into place that can improve work relationships and improve productivity and communication. In A Survival Guide for Working With Humans, author and consultant Gini Graham Scott offers dozens of practical tools and examples that can help others resolve everyday conflicts and survive their jobs.

Problems and Opportunities
In an effort to help others turn problems into opportunities, Scott offers guidelines on how they can maneuver through the unpredictable pitfalls of the workplace and put a positive spin on whatever happens. As the author of 35 books that often deal with getting along better at work, Scott has helped those in the working world deal with change, solve problems, resolve conflicts and ethical dilemmas, and become more creative when making choices. Throughout A Survival Guide for Working With Humans, she presents an approach to better work relationships that combines pragmatism, ethics, intuition, rational communication, and action. By answering common questions about dealing with everyday work experiences and business relationships, Scott helps readers cope with gossip, poor communication, and back stabbing by using common sense and a sense of fair play. She also shows them when to become more aggressive and even devious when confronting especially difficult dilemmas.

Each chapter in A Survival Guide for Working With Humans introduces a problem, offers a story or two about people who faced the problem, and a quiz that lists responses that could be used to deal with the problem. Scott completes each chapter with a discussion of what people did to resolve their problems successfully, and lessons that can be learned from the experiences of others.

Revenge and Fraud
Some of the topics Scott covers throughout include:

Revenge: Instead of seeking revenge, a good approach in a situation where you feel someone has wronged you is to wait until your initial feeling of anger has subsided. Then, if possible, call or write that person and ask to have a discussion with him or her, preferably one-on-one. Overly sensitive people: Avoid saying or doing what triggers a defensive reaction. Instead, say or do things to build up the person's self-esteem. If you feel like you continually have to walk on eggshells around someone, maybe you should be walking away. Fraud: Con artists can con you because they are so personable and charming. Before you fully trust someone, you must know who they are, which takes time. Do some checking before you start writing checks to be sure the person you are checking on checks out.

Scott provides useful advice for those who must cope with aggressive people, political battles, ethical problems, or people who ask for too much, and also offers tips on getting and keeping a job. As an additional bonus, she also presents a toolbox of techniques for thinking about and improving relationships at work that includes numerous styles for resolving conflicts and handling ethical issues, as well as a self-assessment quiz that can help readers see themselves and their own strengths and weaknesses better.