Wrestling with Difficult Stakeholders: A Handbook for Mastering Your Communication with Difficult People

Christopher Shen · Simon Moss

Feb 2020 · Christopher Shen

About this ebook

Wrestling with Difficult Stakeholders offers practical, validated techniques that all employees, from recent graduates to experienced managers, can apply to their interactions with a range of difficult people in their businesses and lives. 

The ability to deal with difficult stakeholders is essential when interacting with others in the workplace. It’s important to identify the reasons why we find them difficult and explore our response to them. 

In this interactive handbook, you will learn practical strategies for dealing with difficult stakeholders, outraged people and those demonstrating emotional distress, including communication techniques, empathy and body language. This will help you to be assured and effective whenever you face them and will give you more confidence in any situation.

Ratings and reviews

Wrestling with Difficult Stakeholders is an exercise in both self awareness and social awareness. Using psychology, combined with social communication skills and common sense, you get a simple framework to navigate past different social interactions that you may come across in your daily life, be it at work, a social gathering, or at home. These methods help ensure you can achieve the best outcome possible for you and the other person, so that everyone walks away from the interaction feeling like they’ve achieved a positive result. In short, you will not regret getting this book!

Having read one of Moss and Shen’s other works, I had high expectations as I waited to receive my copy of ‘Wrestling with difficult Stakeholders’ in the post. Unlike ’Where Should I Work’ it’s not full of facts and figures from various studies. Instead it provides a concise step-by-step guide to not only understanding ‘difficult stakeholders’ but also how you respond to certain situations… and people! It also covers a lot of Emotional Intelligence type issues but because you are the subject, it’s more practical than any of the other similar books I’ve read. I’m so glad I got a paper copy as it’s now covered in my squiggles (aka notes). I recommend you do the same because your notes act as a sort of self-discovery process and help you reflect on issues you’ve encoutered - what happened, how you reacted and possibly other ways you can respond to tricky situations. Overall a great little workbook that gives you some practical tools to improve those tricky interactions.

This is a great resource for businesses or individuals who deal with difficult stakeholders - and let’s face it who doesn’t at some point? The strategies and techniques applied throughout this book helped me to reflect on my responses to difficult situations and understand how I can use specific language to diffuse difficult situations. This is a great resource that can be applied to personal or professional environments and is very timely due to the current COVID-19 situation we unfortunately find ourselves in. Well worth the reflective time and effort to reassess your responses to difficult conversations and situations.

About the author

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Christopher Shen is a psychologist who has a passion for developing high-performance solutions in the workplace. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in psychology from Monash University in 1994 and is currently undertaking a PhD in psychology. 

Christopher's passion for elite achievement in sport and personal development is a key motivation in his corporate work. He has represented Australia in freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling and has competed in several mixed martial arts fights. He has also coached wrestling in the Australian Football League and officiates for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, an international mixed martial arts sports event.

Simon Moss is Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor at Charles Darwin University. His primary research concerns how the characteristics of organisations and societies, such as inequality of income or leadership, influence the brain function and ultimately the mood, creativity, intuition, engagement and honesty of individuals.