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Does the advice in the article apply to interacting with people who are not well-intentioned? In my experience the truly impossible collaborations always invol

Does the advice in the article apply to interacting with people who are not well-intentioned? In my experience the truly impossible collaborations always involved people who wanted to play politics, take credit for stuff they didn't do, undermine me etc. On the other hand I was almost always able to remove friction if the person I was working with was well-intentioned and non-political.

weekay 7y ago
This is has been bugging me for some time as well. How does one differentiate between a well intended Vs not in a typical work environment? Intentions are interpreted through various signals and when there are various strands of office politics in play it makes it really difficult to open up and follow the playbook suggested. The typical fear of are we giving away too much information by opening up and is it going to make it worse sometimes comes to play. Wish human interactions were simple
- leto_ii 7y ago
  I think the best that we can do is to observe people over time and slowly build trust or distrust. Work interactions I guess could be treated as a repeated game with imperfect information. We have to try to refine our priors iteratively. The way I did it was to be well-intentioned, honest and open with everybody in the beginning and close up as needed. I would determine if somebody was ill-intentioned based on how they reacted to my feedback and based on their general behavior. Do they tend to talk people behind their back? Do they consistently silo information? Do they offer constructive advice? Do they focus on the actual work rather than on attention-seeking? etc. But indeed the task is not easy and things will never be perfectly clear.
  - weekay 7y ago
    This reminds me of the prisoners dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
ksec 7y ago
Same questions. You cant ignore them , they do suck up 100x better than what you do. They never get blamed, you do not have organisational power over them, you can play politics but it is tiring, you cant be friends with them because they stab you in the back. They are also functionless, and low in the actual task skill set. This happens more often in family business, although there are lots of blue blood in many large enterprise as well. Sometimes I just want to get the job done, I dont want a full blown internal war with another team.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > This happens more often in family business It may be even more prevalent in large corporations. Wherever there are many layers of management there's a lot of room for people who like climbing the greasy pole.
- watwut 7y ago
  There are also technically skilled political people. And these can do awful lot of damage in culture that can't deal with bad polics. Functionally incapable people are easier to deal with (you just don't hide their problems and isolate others so that it is hard to blame on them). It serves no one to pretend that sociopathy and knowledge or usefulness are mutually exclusive.
slumdev 7y ago
My key takeaway from the article was to create a Career Stakeholder Map. This must be something taught in business school. I've never heard of it. Someone who is not well-intentioned would rank very low on the "Interest" scale. Where they rank on the "Power" scale is independent of their intentions.
- btrettel 7y ago
  Wikipedia seems to be an okay reference on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis Google mostly returned SEO garbage on this for me.
at_a_remove 7y ago
Once upon a time I received quite a lot of well-meaning advice on dealing with organizational difficulties, "deal with the process, not the people," and so on. I was told that I focused too much on individuals. The person who kept pushing this advice on me -- they would be referred to as a "thought leader" these days -- was absolutely blind-sided and shoved out by a bad actor. As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations, drive out good people, and so on. I have noticed that saying you have a bad actor reflects poorly on the people doing the hiring (this insulated one of the bad actors until all of the relevant hiring parties left), but so much of it seems like willful disregard. I find myself sometimes amazed at how easily greased people are by snake oil salesmen selling largely themselves and a kind of "don't even worry about it" optimism.
- codyZ 7y ago
  Multiple people in my last organization fit this bill. Worse, these bad actors are somehow able to leverage their incompetency to be branded as 'thought leaders' themselves. Its comically impressive...
- LeoTinnitus 7y ago
  The sad thing is the snake oil merchant method is the only way to get a job. If we all had to have evidence and proof of our skills and honesty, meritocratic hiring would be the standard.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations Absolutely. In my experience there are vicious cycles at play. Political people (that's my name for bad actors) seem on average better at identifying whether somebody is political or not. They are also better at reinforcing each other. Political people will tend to hire and promote political people since that's the game they understand. Non-political people might tend to promote more of their own kind, but they will probably be worse at spotting the political kind, hence they will make more mistakes wrt promoting competence. Come to think of it this whole thing seems quite amenable to some sort of evolutionary game theory. Maybe in conjunction with social network theory. I'm curious if anybody studied this already.

weekay 7y ago

This is has been bugging me for some time as well. How does one differentiate between a well intended Vs not in a typical work environment? Intentions are interpreted through various signals and when there are various strands of office politics in play it makes it really difficult to open up and follow the playbook suggested. The typical fear of are we giving away too much information by opening up and is it going to make it worse sometimes comes to play. Wish human interactions were simple

leto_ii 7y ago
I think the best that we can do is to observe people over time and slowly build trust or distrust. Work interactions I guess could be treated as a repeated game with imperfect information. We have to try to refine our priors iteratively. The way I did it was to be well-intentioned, honest and open with everybody in the beginning and close up as needed. I would determine if somebody was ill-intentioned based on how they reacted to my feedback and based on their general behavior. Do they tend to talk people behind their back? Do they consistently silo information? Do they offer constructive advice? Do they focus on the actual work rather than on attention-seeking? etc. But indeed the task is not easy and things will never be perfectly clear.
- weekay 7y ago
  This reminds me of the prisoners dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

ksec 7y ago

Same questions. You cant ignore them , they do suck up 100x better than what you do. They never get blamed, you do not have organisational power over them, you can play politics but it is tiring, you cant be friends with them because they stab you in the back. They are also functionless, and low in the actual task skill set. This happens more often in family business, although there are lots of blue blood in many large enterprise as well. Sometimes I just want to get the job done, I dont want a full blown internal war with another team.

leto_ii 7y ago
> This happens more often in family business It may be even more prevalent in large corporations. Wherever there are many layers of management there's a lot of room for people who like climbing the greasy pole.
watwut 7y ago
There are also technically skilled political people. And these can do awful lot of damage in culture that can't deal with bad polics. Functionally incapable people are easier to deal with (you just don't hide their problems and isolate others so that it is hard to blame on them). It serves no one to pretend that sociopathy and knowledge or usefulness are mutually exclusive.

slumdev 7y ago

My key takeaway from the article was to create a Career Stakeholder Map. This must be something taught in business school. I've never heard of it. Someone who is not well-intentioned would rank very low on the "Interest" scale. Where they rank on the "Power" scale is independent of their intentions.

btrettel 7y ago
Wikipedia seems to be an okay reference on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis Google mostly returned SEO garbage on this for me.

at_a_remove 7y ago

Once upon a time I received quite a lot of well-meaning advice on dealing with organizational difficulties, "deal with the process, not the people," and so on. I was told that I focused too much on individuals. The person who kept pushing this advice on me -- they would be referred to as a "thought leader" these days -- was absolutely blind-sided and shoved out by a bad actor. As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations, drive out good people, and so on. I have noticed that saying you have a bad actor reflects poorly on the people doing the hiring (this insulated one of the bad actors until all of the relevant hiring parties left), but so much of it seems like willful disregard. I find myself sometimes amazed at how easily greased people are by snake oil salesmen selling largely themselves and a kind of "don't even worry about it" optimism.

codyZ 7y ago
Multiple people in my last organization fit this bill. Worse, these bad actors are somehow able to leverage their incompetency to be branded as 'thought leaders' themselves. Its comically impressive...
LeoTinnitus 7y ago
The sad thing is the snake oil merchant method is the only way to get a job. If we all had to have evidence and proof of our skills and honesty, meritocratic hiring would be the standard.
leto_ii 7y ago
> As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations Absolutely. In my experience there are vicious cycles at play. Political people (that's my name for bad actors) seem on average better at identifying whether somebody is political or not. They are also better at reinforcing each other. Political people will tend to hire and promote political people since that's the game they understand. Non-political people might tend to promote more of their own kind, but they will probably be worse at spotting the political kind, hence they will make more mistakes wrt promoting competence. Come to think of it this whole thing seems quite amenable to some sort of evolutionary game theory. Maybe in conjunction with social network theory. I'm curious if anybody studied this already.