Dealing with Difficult People: How to Deal with Nasty Customers, Demanding Bosses and Annoying Co-workers. Rev. ed.

Louise Karch is a career consultant with Carswell Partners in London, Ontario.

If you score low on the currently popular Emotional IQ scales or just
don’t get the weirdness of humanity, this book will help you
understand why people behave in the ways that they do. In fact, you can
look up pretty much any annoying behaviour and find the root cause along
with several tips on how to reduce or manage the difficult person’s
behaviour.

The book is organized into seven sections: “Understanding Behaviour
and Its Effects,” “Dealing with Manipulators,” “Basic
Communication Skills,” “Dealing with Difficult Clients,”
“Supervisors,” “Co-workers,” and “Subordinates.”
Particularly impressive are the dialogues—say, between a supervisor
and an employee—which illustrate how easy it is for false assumptions
and personality preferences to wreak havoc. The author explains how,
with a little insight, you could work the conflict and misunderstandings
out.

Until evolution is complete and we get along easily and fight fair,
books like this will help make corporate life a little easier for the
perpetually perplexed.