From Difficult to Disturbed: Understanding and Managing Dysfunctional Employees

Chapter 12. Tough at the Top: Organizational Stress Management and Leadership

You’re a conscientious manager—you’ve proven that by reading this book. And by now you realize (if you didn’t know it already) that no matter at what level in the organization you manage, you couldn’t be good at what you do if you didn’t possess the essential qualities of leadership.

Indeed, a recurrent theme of this book has been that most organizations are only as good as their leaders. No matter how democratized the decision-making process in an organization becomes, someone still has to make the difficult command decisions, to sit at the desk on which the proverbial buck often drops with a thud. If that person is you, then you probably know both the exhilarations ...