Mike Leibling

General Background and Overview
This was one of those books that just jumped out at me on the shelves. In addition to being generally interested in communication as a whole, I’m also interested in understanding people – why they do what they do, and how to best respond to get the most effective outcome for whatever my goal is in interacting with them (note, I’m not always particularly good at remembering to do such things in practice, but I am interested in knowing, and at least trying new techniques out). The blurb on the back of the book comments that “Difficult people can make life impossible... How People Tick is a practical guide to many types of difficult people and how to best handle them”. The author is a trainer and NLP counsellor who’s worked with (amongst others) Saatchi & Saatchi

Good Stuff
How People Tick is reasonably easy to read, and someone who’s completely new to all this ‘interpersonal dynamics’ stuff and finds themselves dealing with someone in the workplace who consistently irritates them (for whatever reason) might well find it a useful source of ideas for techniques to – one way or the other – be less irritated with them. I found some of the individual techniques interesting and potentially useful, especially the few times I recognised specific NLP techniques cropping up.

Bad Stuff
My main issues with this book revolve around structure and oversimplistic-ness. The book is structured to go wide and shallow: identifying 45 different types of ways that co-workers can ‘be’ (by which the author really means the behaviours they exhibit) that can be annoying or upsetting in the workplace, and then spending 2-3 pages per type theorising on why they might do it, and possible ways to either get them to change, or work constructively with them despite the way they are. Firstly , this means it’s like reading 45 separate mini-essays, each of which bears no relationship to anything else in the book, and there’s no progression or building of skills over the course of the book – just a whole load of disjointed suggestions. In fact, it’s almost more like a dictionary of difficult-people-techniques, where you realise someone’s annoying or upsetting you, consult the Table of Contents to see which particular type of annoyance category they’d fall most closely under, and then go read the 2-3 pages dedicated to understanding and dealing with that annoyance.

And the downside of that, of course, is that there’s not really a lot of depth you can cover in the course of 2-3 pages. Especially when you have to spend half of that time theorising on all the possible reasons why someone might be displaying the behaviours that annoy you, there’s very little room to explore the practical aspects of exactly what *you* can control and/or do to constructively change the situation. Which means that, for anyone with any kind background in applied or behavioural psych, a lot of the suggestions seem either basic common sense, or overly simplistic.

Rating and Recommendations
OK, I’ve pretty much already summed up my thoughts above: if you’re completely new to applied interpersonal psychology, or you really only want a 30-second reference guide, you’ll probably find “How People Tick” a useful read/reference source. If you want anything deeper or more engaging, however, I’d avoid this one – it’s going to disappoint you. I think I'll give it a 6.5/10... with a note that this is an area I’d actually like to read more about and build up some better practical skills in.… (more)