Stephen loves his job. Crazy right? Not kidding. He loves it. There is nothing else he would rather do to make scratch. It helps that he is great at what he does. I asked him one part of the job he hates and he struggled for something, anything, that made the gig at least slightly unpleasurable.

“Oh wait,” he said after a few moments of thought “my boss is a massive penis.”

He didn’t say it quite like that, but this is a PG-13 blog, so I’ll let imaginations run wild about the word he actually used in reference to his boss “the Richard”.

This isn’t uncommon. Many people find themselves in careers and positions that they love, like or don’t mind, only to find themselves saddled with a boss that is less than stellar.

How does a employee handle a terrible boss?

Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster propose the following in their new book Working for You Isn’t Working for Me: The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your Boss; detect, detach, depersonalize and deal. Let’s call them “The Four D’s for handling a Di…ehhh Richard.” You get the idea.

Crowley and Elster cite real life case studies to delve into the personal and interpersonal exchanges between managers and underlings to get to the root issues. They suggest simple and researched coping tactics and provide real, plausible methods on how to handle unbearable superiors in the work place.

Among my favorite sections is the chapter reviewing twenty boss behaviors that drive workers bonkers, not only because it was spot on accurate, but because it eases the fears of most working stiffs that they aren’t the only person in the world unlucky enough to have a boss act like a jackass. Many bosses seem to exhibit very typical behaviors.

The book was easy to digest and I’d recommend it to any 9-5er in any line of work.

Thankfully, two Harvard-trained psychotherapists like Crowley and Elster wrote a book of such a delicate nature. I had a similar idea and proposal titled “How one stapler to the temple could kill a fella”.

It was to be my War and Peace.

Click here to get Working for You Isn’t Working for Me or their first book Working With You is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work

Don’t miss a Minimum Rage post! Click here to subscribe!