Case 5: Decision

It is a smart strategy for Bernie to concentrate on building good horizontal relationships—but not to the point where he ignores any opportunity to build a relationship with Gloria, his aloof boss. Even though Gloria may ap-pear to be unapproachable, Bernie should continue to wait and watch for opportunities to build a stronger relationship through hard work, friendliness, suggestions for improvements, and other means. Just because others have failed to build a healthy relationship with the supervisor doesn’t mean that Bernie should give up. He could easily make the mistake of putting all of his human-relations eggs in one horizontal basket.

Get Your Attitude Is Showing: A Primer of Human Relations, Tenth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.