World's Worst Coworkers | Reading Reddit Stories

The pandemic has taken a toll on workers’ mental health, dialing up anxiety and depression. As we’ve seen with hospital beds and home goods, providers are struggling to meet the surging, urgent demand—and that’s further prolonging people’s struggles. Employers are recognizing that when workers’ mental health suffers, their engagement and productivity does, too. In response, more companies are stepping up to provide mental-health resources and support. Learn how.

Become a great boss through the straightforward, deeply human lessons of Radical Candor. These techniques maintain high employee satisfaction and drive stellar results that you’d never be able to accomplish otherwise. With the two guiding principles of radical candor—caring personally and challenging directly—you’ll build stronger relationships within your team and create a culture of sincere and helpful guidance, inspiring your team members to bring their best and most motivated selves to their work and their collaborations, every day.

Do you feel helpless or angry when confronted with mean people? Do you wish you had better strategies for dealing with them? In The Asshole Survival Guide, Robert I. Sutton offers wisdom for dealing with jerks—rude and tyrannical people of all kinds. Focusing primarily on bad behavior in the workplace, he argues that with the right tools, you can take away a jerk’s power, lessen their effect on you, and keep them from harming others.

In this guide, we’ll cover Sutton’s advice for identifying jerk behavior and knowing when you need to take action against jerks. Additionally, we’ll discuss approaches for dealing with jerks. Within each approach, we’ll explore some of Sutton’s actionable strategies. In our commentary, we’ll touch on other authors’ strategies for dealing with unpleasant people. Furthermore, we’ll explore some of the psychology behind rude and mean behavior and how it affects our mental state.

In Codependent No More, Melody Beattie explores codependency and how it affects people’s lives. A self-help classic and the book that inspired codependency 12 Step Programs around the country, Codependent No More provides explanations, advice, and compassion for people struggling with codependency.

In this guide, we’ll explore Beattie’s main principles, including detachment, self-care, and personal responsibility. We’ll compare Beattie’s ideas with other relationship perspectives, such as the positive view of attachment presented in Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller. Finally, we’ll supplement Beattie’s advice with that of modern psychologists and self-help experts, providing concrete steps for you to start living for yourself again.

Feedback is any information you receive about yourself; it’s how you’re ranked, thanked, described, and advised. It can be hard to hear feedback, and much training has been devoted to how to better give it. The key, though, is learning how to better receive it. After all, the receiver is the one who controls whether or not feedback is understood, accepted, and adopted.

In Thanks For the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, two of the co-authors of the bestseller Difficult Conversations, walk you through how to become a better receiver of feedback so that you can more effectively incorporate it into your life and in doing so, improve your job performance and strengthen your personal relationships.

Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That? is a guide to how abusive men think, explaining the motivation and logic behind domestic abuse so that victims can better defend themselves against it. Bancroft draws on his years of experience as a counselor working with abusive men to shed light on how they deliberately confuse, manipulate, and intimidate their victims to get what they want. Ultimately, Bancroft hopes that readers will use his book to better assert their own humanity and independence, either leaving the relationship or demanding that their partner take responsibility for and change his abusive behavior.

This guide will break down Bancroft’s insights into the motivations and justifications behind abusive behavior and supplement them with the work of other abuse advocates writing since the book’s publication in 2002. We’ll also provide updated statistics and compare domestic abuse to other forms of violence.

In a span of just 15 years, Netflix underwent four major evolutions to grow from a fledgling DVD-by-mail company to an award-winning entertainment behemoth, boasting over 200 million subscribers across 190 countries. In No Rules Rules, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and business professor and author Erin Meyer detail how the company achieved this level of success by implementing unconventional management practices that empower employees and promote innovation.

In this guide, you’ll learn why Netflix fires adequate employees, why employees need to critique their bosses, and why it pays to give workers unlimited vacation time.

We’ll compare the Netflix culture with other unorthodox workplace cultures—such as those at Pixar Animation Studios and hedge fund Bridgewater—and cite other works to support or offer counter-arguments to the management ideas detailed in the book.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine takes us inside the madness, corruption, and greed at the heart of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It tells the story of an eccentric collection of investors who saw the folly of the subprime mortgage-backed securities market—and found a way to bet against it. By focusing on individuals who saw these worthless securities for what they truly were, The Big Short explores the complexities and irrationalities of modern capitalism and forces us to seriously question the wisdom (and motivations) of the financial elites who wield so much power over our economy, society, and politics.

Meetings are the lifeblood of an organization—they are central to its success, but they often seem useless and too long. This presents a paradox—how can you make meetings productive when your staff views them as pointless? The answer is to make meetings better.

Death By Meeting uses the parable of a struggling executive to provide a roadmap for consistently productive meetings. Learn why attempting to defuse tension among employees is a mistake, and how injecting more drama into four unique types of meetings is the key to a more passionate, engaged, and successful team.