Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work Paperback – Alison Green

We devote a large part of our adult life to professional work. Giving the lion’s share of our life’s work, sometimes we are guided only by financial motives, and sometimes (and this is the best situation) professional activity is our passion. However, in the course of performing our duties we most often deal with other people: superiors, co-workers or our subordinates. Being with such a large number of people is quite often the cause of situations from which we do not know how to politely, but sometimes firmly, choose. Did none of us have to deal with a boss who required answering emails and answering phones in the evenings and at weekends? Have you not wondered, dear readers, how to let your boss know that the deadline is unrealistic or you are overloaded with projects? And how to react to such a sentence when you are the bosses and you hear from your subordinates about the excess of their duties, and your opinion about it is different? And how to communicate to a colleague who makes private phone calls during working hours that it makes it difficult for you to concentrate? Well, how do you communicate that? What to say?

What’s inside the book?

The answers to this question, as well as many others, can be found in a book by Alison Green, “Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work Paperback”. Alison Green has many years of experience as a team leader and is the creator of the Ask a Manager blog, where, as she recalls, she received about 60 emails a day from people asking for advice on how to communicate effectively in the workplace. Receiving such a huge number of messages asking for solutions to sometimes difficult and astonishing situations between co-workers or boss and superiors led her to write the book, which is supposed to help us (employees and employers) to communicate effectively, as she writes herself:

“Often it is just that much to talk about. However, people do not decide on it, because they have no idea what and how to say it”.

The book “Ask the boss…” consists, in addition to an introduction and conclusions summarising briefly the main principles of effective communication, of four chapters. Each of them is devoted to specific interpersonal relations and difficulties that we may encounter during: an interview with superiors and co-workers, a job interview, or when you, dear readers, are the boss and need to acquire the ability to communicate in a friendly and concrete way with your subordinates. In addition to the sometimes mundane (you don’t invite colleagues to your wedding, or you want to withdraw from a social meeting after work) and sometimes completely bizarre (you had to sleep in the same bed with a colleague on a business trip, or how to react when a colleague writes about you maliciously on his blog) situations that we may encounter at work, Alison Green presents ways of communicating that enable us to solve them effectively and painlessly, as well as sample statements that we can use in a given situation. The result of reading this book is not only the ability to communicate effectively in the workplace, but also the courage to start difficult conversations and to believe that:

You should initiate conversations when something is bothering you or when you believe that something can be dealt with differently. Starting a conversation on difficult or sensitive topics does not have to translate into alienation or tension in your relationship with other people. After all, you can talk straightforwardly, but not be rude; you can be assertive, but not be unpleasant.

Summary

Although this book is not read with baked goods on its face, it is not absorbed within a few days, it is worthwhile reviewing it by reading the individual chapters that interest us. I do not recommend reading the book at once. I read it like that and sometimes I felt slightly bored with it. However, remember that it was mainly because the situation did not concern me, I never found myself in it. But in the cases that I was in contact with, I read it with great commitment and I thought, “Woow! That’s the way to do it?! How simple it is. I would probably never make such a polite, yet very concrete statement to my superior.”

To sum up, the book is primarily aimed at employees, employers and co-workers, but the principles of communication contained in the book and the author’s valuable tips are so universal that they can be applied in any other area of life.

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