Difficult People

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

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4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2018

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you work with a jerk? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Stanford management professor Bob Sutton, an expert in dealing with difficult co-workers. They talk through what to do when your colleague is a bully, when your boss never takes the blame, and when your direct report gets on everyone’s bad side — but still brings in the money.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.6	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.7	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.2	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.5	The truth is that we don't have to let the tension, conflicts, and misunderstandings get us down.
0:22.1	We can do something about them.
0:25.7	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:27.7	We take your questions about workplace dilemmas, and with the help of experts and insights
0:33.0	from academic research, we help you move forward.
0:42.9	Today we're answering your questions about difficult people, a topic our guest has written many books about.
0:44.6	Bob Sutton teaches organizational behavior at Stanford.
0:47.9	Bob, thanks for being on the show.
0:49.6	Great to be on the show.
0:51.3	We could do every show on difficult people because it seems like a large
0:56.2	percentage of the questions we naturally get are going to be on that because that's what people
1:00.8	worry about, right? It's kind of a two-by-two. It's difficult and competent versus incompetent.
1:08.6	That's my general model of the world. Right. So, Bob, is there someone in your
1:13.0	professional life who's really bothered you throughout the years? Yeah. So it is not a particular
1:19.1	person. I can think of four or five of them. These are petty tyrants. When you give people
1:24.7	a fair amount of responsibility, but give them low prestige or low status, they really do take it out on you.
1:32.3	It's so interesting that you bring up petty tyrants because I actually just ran into this experience.
1:37.5	And everyone kept telling me to calm down.
	...

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