Coping With Difficult People

Review by Craig L. Howe for A Survival Guide for Working with Humans: Dealing with Whiners, Back-Stabbers, Know-It-Alls, and Other Difficult People
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I love to work. It is the people with whom I work that transform my hours at work into an unpleasant experience.

In Survival Guide for Working with Humans, Gini Graham Scott offers me practical tools to help me resolve my everyday conflicts.

Each chapter introduces a problem and offers one or two illustrations of them. A discussion of what the people did to resolve their problems successfully follows. Some of the problems covered include revenge, fraud, and overly sensitive people. As a bonus, the author includes a toolbox of techniques for improving work relationships.

Since I love my work, the price of this book was a small price to pay to improve my relationships there.

Review by Elizabeth Ray for A Survival Guide for Working with Humans: Dealing with Whiners, Back-Stabbers, Know-It-Alls, and Other Difficult People
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A fortune cookie will give you better advice than this book will. In fact, much of the author’s advice sounds like it came directly from a fortune cookie… actually, maybe not, since fortune cookie writers are more creative and resort less frequently to cliches than does Dr. Graham.

Each chapter follows the same format. She begins by describing in painstaking detail some scenario involving a difficult person. I would have been satisfied with a brief summary of what the problem was, but instead the author treats us to pages of “he said” “then she said” dialogue, and vivid descriptions of how the persecuted person feels about each of the “he said” and “she said” statements. I suppose in a way this technique did make me sympathize with the non-difficult person in the scenario, because after reading the accounts I started to hate the difficult person too.

After the lengthy setup, the author then asks the reader what he or she would do in that situation. She presents a variety of possible actions, some of which are clearly stupid (the equivalent of cussing someone out in a meeting) and others which might be advisable. However, she gives no clear guidance as to the best course of action, which made me wonder “Why am I reading this book?”

At the conclusion of each drawn out chapter are “take home messages,” which sound like they came from the author’s local Chinese takeout place… I suspect that she eats a lot of Lo Mein, and builds each chapter around whatever vague advise her fortune cookie offers that night.

Review by J.F.L.-Fairfax VA for A Survival Guide for Working with Humans: Dealing with Whiners, Back-Stabbers, Know-It-Alls, and Other Difficult People
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When faced with whiners, know-it-alls and other problem personalities in the office, this is book can be helpful with the many anecdotes and solutions that it presents. However, I rate this lower than other books out there. A better book, in my opinion, will “Dealing with People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst”, author Rick Brinkman. I prefer the Brinkman book for providing an easier-to-remember template for identifying the types of problem-personalities, the possible underlying reasons as to their behavior, and a set of action-steps to deal with people who are behaving at their worst.