How to Deal With an Employee Who Has a Smart-Ass Comment for Everything

A Manager's Survival Guide to Sarcasm, Eye Rolls, and the Reply-All Comedian
By Nate Quigley

You announced the new timesheet system. A hand went up. You knew whose hand it was before you looked.

"Quick one. Is this punishment for something specific, or just general?"

And the room laughed.

How to Deal With an Employee Who Has a Smart-Ass Comment for Everything is the manager's survival guide to sarcasm, eye rolls, and the reply-all comedian. It is very funny, and it is hiding a real management book inside: the one that turns your sharpest heckler into your best deputy.

Inside, you'll learn:

• A field guide to the six species of workplace smart-ass, from the Deadpan Sniper to the legally deniable Mutterer
• Why sarcasm is engagement wearing armor, and why the silence after it stops is the real emergency
• The three moves that win the moment without entering a wit contest you cannot win
• Judo, not boxing: pre-mortems, red teams, and how to hire the heckling away from the heckling market
• The line between funny, fine, and fireable, and the exact script for the pattern conversation
• How to praise a cynic without triggering the gag reflex
• What to do when the smart-ass is right (they are right more than you want to know)
• A five-question quiz on whether the problem is, awkwardly, you
• Nate's Cheat Sheet: every move, zone, and script from the book on one page

Every chapter ends with The Part You Can Actually Use: the tool, minus the jokes.

The eye roll was never the enemy. The enemy was everything unsaid.

Pairs with its companion volume, How to Deal With a Boss Who Asks Too Much, written for the person on the other side of the desk. Buy one for yourself and one for them. Anonymously, if necessary.