Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

This book has very simplistic ideas and lacks the constructive solutions that I hoped to learn. For example, her advice for dealing with people prone to explosive temper is "If you stay around someone and feel you are walking on eggshells, find ways to handle the eggs--and that person--more gently so the shells don't break." Reading her advice made me wonder what kind of education and experience she has that qualifies her to write such a book. Interestingly enough, there's very little information about that in her bio. It looks like her Ph.D is in journalism or English. I would love to send this book back and get my money back. I would probably spend it better on a book written by an educated, credentialed, psychologist who understands the difference between constructively handling people with behavior problems versus enabling them to continue to abuse others and make work life hades.

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.

I like the stories in the book. Those are prime examples of people I saw and I'm seeing every day. The book is excellent for understanding different people and different situations in which you might interact with them. Obviously the book is written by someone who understands people's mind.

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.

This book is really great; I call it the Rodney King guide to the workplace because it really is about "Can't we all just get along?" And, if we can't....then it gives you the guidelines to follow to see heads roll, or sometimes, how to choose to lose your own head on the chopping block.

I like that it doesn't give a "pat" answer, but provides several best/worse case scenarios & allows you to think the problem out, hopefully BEFORE you encounter it. If you are in the middle of dealing with one of these treasured co-workers, then this guide will be very helpful in giving you strategy for dealing with the problem in a real life way.

Loved it!

This book provides some very useful information that will assist any manager in helping their staff members to work better with each other. It is clearly and thoughtfully written. I highly recommend this book to anyone who works with Humans!

First purchased book so lacking it required a negative review, but this read is all fluff presenting the very ideas that bounce around my own brain in trying to figure out a practical strategy to deal with a problematic person without even so much as a suggestion for a different approach. And, any positive review seems to reflect the books description so my advice is don't waste your money. I truly would like my money back.

I found this book very helpful on ways to have better relationships at work and I really enjoyed the stories. I could recognize some of the examples in my own workplace and I got ideas for better dealing with some of the difficult people there. I liked the idea of having a repertoire of techniques I could use in different situations, as illustrated by the stories. A good book on this topic, and I recommend it highly.

This book does not show that the author has any real world experience in dealing w/ opportunists, liars, manipulators, . . . that are common in the work place.