A Guide to Managing Employees From Hell

What to do when the people who work for you don’t work out as expected

A Survival Guide to Managing Employees From Hell: Handling Idiots, Whiners, Slackers and Other Workplace Demons. By Gini Graham Scott. Amacom/American Management Association, 230 pp., $15, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

Not long ago, Computerworld magazine ran an article about high-tech mavericks, including a female programmer who sometimes came to work in a Girl Scout uniform or cheerleading outfit. That’s one definition of “an employee from hell.”

As any manager knows, there are plenty of others. The slowpoke who’s been working on the same project since the Clinton administration. The friend of the boss who’s incompetent but too well connected to fire. The complainer who gripes every day about how far the parking lot is from the office.

Books that deal with situations like these typically have one of several problems. They may come from celebrities who dole out common sense and act as though they’ve decoded the Rosetta Stone. They may patronize you with lots of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points!!! Or they may peddle one-size-fits-all advice that’s too general to help with the complex and varied problems that managers have to solve.

The American Management Association seems to have recognized all of this and has come out with a book that aims to avoid such problems. Gini Graham Scott’s A Survival Guide to Managing Employees From Hell is a no-nonsense paperback that devotes a section to each of more than two dozen types of workplace saboteurs, including “the prima donna,” “the impossible intern,” and “the negative Nelly or Ned.” Each chapter provides a one- or two-page anonymous case study of a different kind of difficult employee. Then it lists possible ways of handling the situation, tells what the manager did, and gives tips on dealing with similar people.

Some of the advice has appeared in many other guides for managers (“set clear boundaries”). And the book doesn’t always avoid repackaging conventional business wisdom. But A Survival Guide to Managing Employees from Hell is much more useful and less sugar-coated than such recent books as The Power of Nice. An implicit theme is that the chocolates-and-compliments approach doesn’t always work. Sometimes you just have to fire those employees from hell, and this book suggests when it’s time to take away their pitchforks.

Best line: “Many bad employees would create problems in any situation or workplace. But sometimes what makes for a difficult employee in one working culture – such as a loner in a highly social, team-player environment – may make for a highly productive and valuable employee in another setting.”

Worst line (tie): “Consider possible options and outcomes.” And “Decide on the best option by weighing positives and negatives …” These are examples of the common sense dressed up in the stilted business jargon that the book mostly avoids.

Publication: January 2007 www.ginigrahamscott.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Who Writes Better Sex Scenes, Danielle Steel or James McGreevey?

Take this test to see if you can spot the red, white, and purple prose of the former governor New Jersey

The Confession. By James E. McGreevey with David France. Regan/HarperCollins, 369 pp., $26.95.

Political analysts have not been kind to this memoir by the New Jersey governor who resigned and told all to Oprah after outing himself as a “gay American.” I believe that too many of them have ignored good parts of the book – the sex scenes.

When it comes to red, white, and purple prose, parts of The Confession rival anything in the work of America’s best-selling romance novelist. Here are a dozen lines, half by James McGreevey and half by Danielle Steel. Can you tell who wrote each? Answers appear at the end of the review.

1) “In spite of myself, I knew I would miss him. Who else would wear red spandex and lime green satin, not to mention the leopard G-string?”

2) “I tried to sit up, but he was lying on top of me, and I couldn’t. ‘Oh, shit, what happened?’ I could hardly get the words out, and wondered if all my ribs were broken.”

3) “But I had to admit as he massaged my shoulders and rubbed my back, it was incredibly relaxing. And after a while, in spite of myself, I sighed, and rolled over on my stomach.”

4) “I stretched out on the couch and placed my legs out over his knees … I then leaned forward and hugged him, and kissed his neck. His response was immediate and loving, just what I’d fantasized about since we first locked eyes.”

5) “I pulled him to the bed and we made love like I’d always dreamed … boastful, passionate, whispering … “

6) “It was an endless, breath-consuming, life-giving kiss.”

7) “We undressed and he kissed me. It was the first time in my life that a kiss meant what it was supposed to mean – it sent me through the roof.”

8) “Our first few times burned so fiercely in my mind I could hardly recall them even as we were still lying together. “

9) “‘I love you … You make me so happy…. I’ve never, you know …’”

10) “’I love you. I don’t want to take advantage of you. I don’t want anything from you. Just you.’”

11) “He greeted me in his briefs. ‘Did anybody see you?’ he asked, closing the door quickly.”

12) “ ‘I’ve been waiting for you forever,’ he whispered back. ‘I didn’t know where you were … but I always knew you were out there somewhere.’”

Don’t lose heart if you couldn’t easily tell the prose of the ex-governor from that of the author of novels such as Passion’s Promise and No Greater Love. Could McGreevey himself tell the difference?

Best line: “One of the cardinal rules of New Jersey politics is, there’s no such thing as a private conversation. Governor [Brendan] Byrne once told me this, as though imparting a philosophical truth from the ages. ‘Somewhere along the line,’ he said, ‘you are going to be taped by someone wearing a wire.’ This is who so many political meetings start with a big bear hug – a New Jersey pat down among friends.” And you thought that only happned on The Sopranos.

Worst line: Apart from the sex scenes? Winner #1: McGreevey tells us that when he was visiting peep shows in Times Square and picking up gay men at Parkway rest stops, “taking Holy Communion every week helped me remain Christ-centered.” What was he like when he wasn’t so “Christ-centered”? Winner #2: The cover of the book says that McGreevey “lives in Plainfield, New Jersey, with his partner, Mark O’Donnell, and daughter Jacqueline. “McGreevey’s ex-wife Dina says in the December 2006 issue of New Jersey Monthly that Jacqueline lives with her in their Springfield home and stays with her father every other weekend. “The inaccuracy has since been removed from the website of the publisher … as well as from Amazon.com and the Barnes & Noble website,” Denise Di Stephan writes.

Editors: Judith Regan and Calvert Morgan

Publication: September 2006

FYI: Perhaps the best short review of The Confession by a close observer of New Jersey politics is columnist Paul Mulshine’s “McGreevey Confesses, But We Do Penance” in the Sept. 21, 2006, Star-Ledger. Mulshine analyzes the claims the ex-governor makes in the memoir about his record and concludes that “the book is proof that McGreevey remains as much in denial about his political life as he once was about his personal life.”

Answers to quiz: Lines from the novels of Danielle Steel: 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, and 12. Lines from The Confession: 4, 5, 7, 8. 9, and 11.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.