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How to Deal with Difficult People
BusinessWeek.com
We all know them – those difficult people who seem to delight in spreading misery. Inevitably, you will encounter a difficult person in your personal or professional life. And, this difficult employee, colleague, supplier, customer, relative, neighbor or friend will bring distress into your life. However, with the right strategies, you can deal with him or her effectively.
First, we’ll need to figure out exactly what a difficult person is. As a simple definition, a difficult person is somebody who has certain personality or emotional traits which make very difficult to communicate with. The intensity of somebody’s difficulty varies; some people are mere burdens or almost humorously frustrating, whereas some others can be seriously damaging to productivity and the overall sanity of one’s work environment.
To start, let’s take a look at the types of difficult people we are dealing with.
1. A Breakdown of Difficult People
hotteacher1976
5 months ago
372 comments
Yep, you can't avoid them. But, you can change the way YOU deal with them.
johnslat
10 months ago
1750 comments
Dear Sandra,
No corrections required (well, I might have stuck in a comma after "assigned" and another after "colleagues", but hey - I don't want to seem picky.) Besides, people in glass houses, etc. I'm sure that I make a fair number of mistakes in my postings, so I have no desire to set myself up as an "authority."
But that's a great suggestion - using this as a student lesson. In fact, it would probably be a good way to look at a lot of the articles on TheApple. It seems obvious, now that you suggested this one, but I really hadn't even considered it before.
sanmccarron
10 months ago
1138 comments
This would make a good lesson for students. Whenever groups are assigned there is the inevitable whining about who is grouped with whom (John, feel free to correct my grammar). I tell the students that in the work force they will not be able to choose their colleagues so they need to learn how to deal now.
johnslat
10 months ago
1750 comments
Sooner or later - and probably before now - we all run into these kind of people. What's worse, we often have to work with them, day-in and day-out. They can make your workplace highly unpleasant - if you let them. This "guide to handling them" is really quite good. I think the tactics mentioned would be effective with most such - to use the technical term - jerks. However, there are a few that are not only "difficult"; they're actually whacko. If you're unfortunate enough to encounter any of those types, I'm afraid no tactic is going to do much good.