Why your toxic colleagues climb to the top
fastcompany.comStory time for the young kids in the room: Once upon a time, in my role as a technical consultant for hire at a large multinational corporation, I found myself tasked with a management board presentation. I was filling in for several project managers who were otherwise engaged due to urgent commitments.
My responsibility was to elucidate the difficulties stemming from the company's current internal systems integration architecture. I was to outline immediate measures for mitigating existing issues and offer a comprehensive plan for long-term resolution. With only a few days' notice, I prepared the required technical material, knowing well that the management board I was to address had a decidedly technical inclination.
As I delved into the presentation, I began to perceive an escalating sense of discomfort in the room. I quickly sought to discern whether the material was perhaps too tedious or excessively technical. Although the management board was known for its technical expertise, I couldn't immediately pinpoint the cause of the unrest. However, clarity struck in a sudden flash when a senior member of management hesitantly inquired, "Why are you using Mark's materials?" Mark, a pseudonym in this story, was the absent CTO who should have been present at the meeting.
After an instant of cognitive dissonance, the truth become clear...The CTO, who had engaged my services as a technical consultant, had been presenting my work to the management board for months, all the while assuming full authorship of the technical reports and presentations...
Dude, I had a colleague, senior to me, do the opposite. I had an idea that I struggled internally to get off the ground for months and months. I pretty much did all the research, found the contacts, got the architecture direction, sought feedback and buy in from multiple stakeholders - including him. Practically I was ignored.
After about 6 months, he's presenting this identical idea to our team!
Guess what, it was approved by upper management!!
Except, the lack of details he had in his super high level stuff lacked any insights, so I called him out in the next meeting and basically said have you seen this document I've been socialising for the last 6 months!?
He said it was 'different'..
This is why stratagems like quiet quitting exist.
But didn't hesitate to go back and use all my notes, research and contacts to quickly backfill all his lack of details with my stuff!
putting “your stuff” into an auditable system with login and timestamps will help a lot in such situations.
with some tools, you even get information on the top visitors to a given page. you know, like if someone needs to fill in their presentation at the last minute.
if someone uses your notes for the benefit of the company, this is fantastic! but you need to save your receipts. just in case you need them.
Agree with all of your points. I had everything documented in a business case format for management to consume with references to more technical topics, in a wiki.
So, anyway, I think things have sort of settled on this stuff a bit now.
I'm been recently made the tech lead on this initiative that I did all the research on and my manager have me kudos for the idea.
In fact we're pivoting on alot of other things at work because of it, with top level leadership support.
So pretty insane.. but anyway
What happened afterwards? It's not quite clear from your writing whether the truth was clear just to you or to everyone involved :)
CTO still at the company. I resigned both on moral grounds, but also because despite the nice hourly billing fee I was charging, I understood the relationship with the CTO, from them on would be ...Let's say...Toxic? :-))
So what happened in that meeting? Did you tell them it wasn't "Mark's" material?
I diplomatically decided not to press on, with the embarrassing subject, but clarified all materials were of my own authorship. I assumed most present understood between the lines, what was happening. I had no illusions of any outcome similar to the feelgood movie stories...These are normally politically well connected players :-) As I mentioned in another comment, CTO still with the company.
Those guys probably gave CTO a slap on the back and said "nice one Mark"
Its water-marked.. :D Punny humans.. but a watermark really would have been a solution.
I'm confused. Isn't that what you were hired for?
I love how the punchline of the article is, "if you are in management you can stop these people!". But 98% of people in management are these people. The remaining 2% are on the short list by their toxic managers for dismissal. Almost all hierarchys in companies exist so dark personalities can exploit others. Plain and simple.
Funny but true!
Sad but true!
A toxic world. We live in a world where good people being silenced and bad people become creators, influencers... And kids grow up being taught (being influenced) by admiring fake things: fake smiles, fake tears, fake beliefs, fake beauties...
I don't think the words "social skills" are correct. "Dark skills" are more suitable, just like the dark patterns. All come down to the human nature.
two sides of the same coin. one allows better integration with society, the other allows easier taking advantage. (yes, one of those is bad.)
both involve the same signals, the same situations, even at times the same actions. the motivations differ.
influencer is only a dirty word because the vast majority cultivate influence for the sake of closing sales. influencing isn’t a new idea, and not inherently bad.
light and dark side of the force, guns can be used to both attack and defend, buildings can be bombed or demolished. however you want to look at it, the tools are uncomfortable because they can be abused. because they have been abused.
the danger in labeling these as dark arts is that typically those who would oppose misuse will avoid the thing that can be misused.
call it a bad person tool, most people that don’t want to be bad are going to be ignorant of what it can do. to them.
When it goes south, the incompetent and incapable do get whats due though.. turns out social manipulation skills do not make bullet proof.
Dunno about that, it took me 24 years to realize both my parents were sociopaths (hello autism) and I'd ended up learning some of the very same techniques they used to harass and belittle me for my entire life. And by "sociopath" I don't even mean anything that could come out of a book or movie, it was so subtle and "insignificant" seeming to pass undetected by so-called friends, support workers and therapists (one time I had a therapist tell me they had no idea what my parents did to me was traumatic, another said they were simply doing their part as parents by utilizing hard punishment) So long as you didn't know them in as intimate and private a context as familial, you'd never know what they truly thought of someone who needed to be smoked out
I almost wish my parents had enough cracks in their defenses to just beat me across the face instead of the long-term psychological punishment they sentenced me to under the guise of learning from my mistakes. At least then there's a concrete playbook to dealing with the aftermath of being a battered teen and I could have saved myself another decade of anguish and self-flagellation instead of continuing to be tricked. To this day they still treat me like a child and don't tolerate me as anyone else than their ideal, I have to force myself to hang up on them because I know from reason it's just a trauma bond, because my emotion will just drag me back to them every time
And the thing is, from the outside they've successfully passed undetected, and it doesn't seem like they will ever get their due as they could have both retired by now. Instead my mom works in healthcare to "give back" after recently being diagnosed with cancer, and my dad is a successful startup co-founder that has won contracts with supermarkets and IT firms, some of them huge companies that everyone has heard of (To be sure it makes me hesitant to pursue the founder lifestyle) To someone from the outside they could look like superstar parents, reasonably moral people. And in places they actually are, in a material sense. It is impossible to deny the material successes of my father that I'm sure dozens of other founders on this very site would be salivating to achieve in their entire lives. But when they speak from the heart you realize they have no emotional skills, instead they simply research what they think people need them to hear to not be called out and repurpose the syllables of those words to meet their own needs. And at the same time they're smart enough never to be cold with their genuine friends, co-workers or family who are on good terms, but me. Me and only me.
And the thing is it's good enough for society at large. No, sociopaths do not necessarily get their due from being inherently cold or amoral, because they can still learn the interfacing standards that allow them to pass and just do well enough on the tests of society.
The only reason you can call someone a sociopath to the world is because they've failed at being a sociopath. If the sociopath is indistinguishable from a non-sociopath, which is by design, nobody else will believe you except the people in the pseudosciences you pay to believe you
My life has taught me that there's no difference in a person who genuinely says something and someone who isn't genuine but says the words in a convincing enough manner. Not to mention, that has given me a whole new perspective on behavioral software interviews that has made me totally disillusioned about the industry and process. They convinced me I was in the wrong for so long, and... To this day I still believe that's at least partially true. In spite of denying contact with them now at every turn. I think I'm beyond the point of being fully convinced otherwise
So no, my parents had iron-clad social manipulation skills but they were both far from incompetent to anyone besides me who asked. it was a valuable lesson that life doesn't emulate fiction, because if life were translated to fiction without embellishments then people would get bored and tend not to care. They have ensured my story is a boring one that resists novelization for the social workers that attempt to listen but has traumatized me regardless
The only thing I can do now is move on, quit blaming myself for everything and pick up the pieces, because all I can tell myself is they didn't define my life and I am my own person, I am my own person...
Still though, useful skills for an A.I. ...
Primitive primate dynamics and manipulations have been on obvious display in all offices I have ever been in. An encounter with one particular individual was the main reason that I went remote over a decade ago.
He was another contractor brought on at the same time as me. From the beginning he seemed to have identified me as a competitor or something. Maybe he sensed my doubt when he described his background as being in rodeo clowning and being a television news personality before learning C++ (it was a C# job).
He immediately took the opportunity to explicitly cast doubt on my skills with the other new coworker after I had spoken about one sentence. I believe he then must have gone behind my back to denigrate me with the boss on at least one occasion.
I did not see or hear anything about him writing code until several weeks after hiring. It seemed as though he was trying to set the record on the number of namespace parts in their framework, which were all repeated entirely on every line. I may not be remembering this right but I think he was actually double-spacing his code. Not like separated into logical blocks, just double spaced.
One day, he deliberately provoked me into a shouting match that got me fired. Someone had asked something about my code, which I started answering, and he was standing nearby and suddenly said something like "I'll handle this. _Why can't you just admit that you made another mistake?_" (or something like that) very loudly. No one was asking me about a mistake or anything. I don't remember but there might have been some aspect of the code that could use improvement that I was explaining as an aside. But whatever it was, his response did not make sense except as a provocation and manipulation. It did in fact enrage me and cause me to initiate the shouting.
I could not stand him because he did little to no useful work that I could see, spent most of his time "mentoring" one of the attractive young female new hires. The boss liked him because he lived on a boat and presented himself as upper class.
Some people you will work with operate at the same socio-ethical level as chimpanzees.
And then there are people like me, I only have hard skills and not enough soft skills. People end up not trusting me because they find out I'm hiding skills. And I end up not using them, and not even trying to convince people what's the right thing to do
And whose fault is it for being aware that you lack skills but refusing to develop them?
Not everybody can develop such skills just because they wish so.
Indeed, wishing is not enough. It requires hard work.
Better take up that hard work then, because this response doesn't really signal "social skills".
I was talking about mental health issues (from genetic stuff like autism to PTSD and social anxiety) that prevent those social skills from developing, regardless of work (any more than someone with depression can just "work" on being happier).
I know exactly what you were talking about, because my social skills are amazing. And my response is the same - hard work.
I'm not sure I follow you. Why are you hiding your skills?
Here is an example where I would have had a better day if I simply didn't show my skills to anyone
Two words: social skills.
Not really. Social skills are just that - skills. How you apply these skills, whether you choose to apply them is a different matter. There are many non-toxic people with social skills who do not flourish in these corporate environments. Moreover, I have met many successful people who are mostly just manipulative and not what one would call naturally social. Maybe that also falls into the "social skill" category but I would differentiate that.
Social skills is almost the opposite of being toxic.
2020
True. But I don’t necessarily think it changes things.
It’d be nice to see a follow up incorporating what we’ve learned about the whole wfh/hybrid practices of late.
But my guess is that the same group will climb just as they would have before. If anything, I’d guess the effect will be made even more pronounced.
So what's the guideline for tagging a submission with the date?
It makes sense to add it if the content of the submission is time-sensitive and so knowledge of the date makes a difference (e.g. an article about some "new breakthrough discovery" which woudn't be such anymore if the piece was written in 2004).
In general, the HN style is that, if it wasn't written this year, tag it with the year.
As if anything changed between 2020 and 2023 regarding "toxic colleagues climbing to the top" or not?