I started reading Trust Your Canary (Amazon) to better understand the concept of “incivility” which had come up as part of some of our DE&I work.
It was pretty helpful around that, but probably the majority of the value I got out of it was in the first few chapters. It also made me consider things that had been normalized working in relatively “uncivil” environments for the majority of my career. However, I found it hard going for a number of reasons – to be fair to the book, a big one was it was just one long trigger about a really toxic work situation.
I’m unclear how helpful it actually was in the end. The guidance was both too abstract and too concrete – in the abstract, it was unclear what to do with it. In the concrete, many of the examples were so egregious, that it was unclear how to apply such things back to a more “normal” level of incivility. It was also heavily office based, with much discussions of union reps etc which made it read like a book about another era.
If you’re looking for depth on the concepts of incivility, it could be worth reading the first few chapters. But generally I don’t think it’s worth the time.