Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work

Advice columnist Green delivers a strained guide to navigating difficult workplace situations. Most often, her answers to readers’ questions—some original to this book and others previously published on her website, also titled Ask a Manager—consist of a variation on the theme of “speak up and be direct,” and, indeed, the book’s utility lies in the scripts provided. Readers fumbling for what to say will be grateful for the precise wording to dig themselves out of a tricky conversation. Whether handling having cried in front of the boss, dealing with a coworker who makes pointed comments about eating habits, or talking to an assistant who is habitually late, the answers are all here. But Green’s approach is unfortunately limiting: rather than offer general, adaptable strategies for resolving workplace issues, she focuses on highly specific and immediate problems. Any given reader is only going to have a handful of these at most, so it’s hard to see whom the audience consists of. Green’s fans will enjoy reading this, but floundering employees would be better served elsewhere. Agent: Heather Flaherty, Bent Agency. (May)