Book Review: Difficult People at Work

Success in any business setting is going to involve dealing with difficult people. Bell and Smith have written an engaging field guide to several different types of difficult people and how to deal with them.

The first half of the book presents a modified Meyers-Briggs type of personality assessment. The labels chosen for the different axes are different from the standard, which I found to be confusing. (On the other hand, I have heard other people complain that the original labels are confusing. For those people, the labels chosen by Bell and Smith may be more accessible to them.)

I was a little disappointed that more was not done with tying the personality assessments to the types of problem employees presented in the second part of the book.

In the second section, we are presented with several identifiable types of problem people, a strategy for dealing with them, and a story about a real-world sighting of each type of problem person. The descriptions were recognizable, the strategies were reasonable, and the stories were interesting.

This is a quick and enjoyable read.