Political awareness, as much as any good social and life strategy, starts with a good understanding of the conflicts of interest.
This is true across all socialization.
Understanding conflicts of interest is a foundational aspect of learning advanced social skills, power dynamics, as well as the scope and opportunities for collaboration (or for manipulation).
Intro
You must learn how and where the interests diverge to properly strategize.
The areas of diverging interest also create more opportuniteis for manipulations and lies.
And they’re more common in business than in most other socialization area.
This is why despite we generally advocate for coopeartion and win-win, at work you may want to dial-up your Machiavellianism.
Of course, without going the full length and becoming a total asshole, or cynic side.
But… Make sure team you is also being taken care of.
Boss VS Employees
This is between you and your boss.
1. You want to work for yourself, your boss wants you to work for the team
The better the team performs, the better it looks on your boss.
Unluckily:
- The better the team performs, the more you’ll struggle to stand out
- The more you do “for the team”, the less you can do for yourself
Solution: Listen to “team you”
Leadership comes at a cost.
But those costs are smallest at work, while the rewards are the biggest.
And while you’re revving up for leading, don’t forget that alongside the “team” there is “team you”, and both of them need your attention.
2. You want to move up, your boss wants to keep you in the team
The general rule:
The better you are at your job, the more your boss wants to keep you within the team.
If you move up, you won’t be helping your boss anymore.
Some unscrupulous bosses might work behind your back to thwart your advancement opportunities.
3. You want to take credit, your boss wants to take it for himself -or the team-
The ideal team for a calculative boss is a team of faceless and anonymous individuals whose good work all fall under his name.
And the opposite is true when the team makes some major mistakes: then he wants to be able to point finger at someone and assign the blame.
Solution: Intelligent self-promotion
This is where self-promotion must meet good political strategies.
Also read here:
Valuable contacts, be customers or powerful people, are power.
You want to keep them to yourself, while your boss wants to share them.
The more you share them, the more you lose power and leverage.
And if you leave, the team won’t miss you when none of your best customers will leave with you.
🔎 Example: Law firm doesn’t want lawyers to answer “thank you” emails
In Bel’s former law firm lawyers were discouraged from answering customers’ ‘thank you’ emails.
Now you understand why: because the partners didn’t want the firm’s customer to grow too close to their employees.
Owners VS Employees
“Owners” refers to anyone with a sizable stake in the company -and its revenues-.
But sometimes non-owners act like owners when they’re given a bit more perks than the ranks and file.
It’s similar dynamics of the nazi’s ‘kapos’.
Or when they’re given the responsibility to ‘control’ others.
Think of HR, for example, and it’s similar dynamics as in Zimbardo’s prison experiment.
1. You want to put yourself first, owners want you to put the company first
This is also why owners love a ‘family’ culture to increase your contributions to the company.
I have seen a similar theme across business titans’ biographies such as Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Phil Knight (Nike), Sam Walton (Walmart), as well as CEOs and VCs (Ben Horowitz).
They all loved their employees and felt like they were all a big family.
But only the top ones get rich.
And only the bottom ones get fired when cost-cutting.
2. You want cash, owners want to pay you with “inspiration”
This is where advanced corporate manipulation kicks in.
The most successful entrepreneurs attract less with cash, and more with vision.
Often, pro-social visions of addressing big humanity’s challenges or making the world better.
The psychological underpinning is related to intrinsic VS extrinsic motivation (Vallerand, 1997).
Solution: Money Talks Straight, Listen to It
Inspiration is great, but also look at the concrete exchange and compensation.
And ensure you’re not being sucked dry and short-changed.
3. You want alliances with colleagues, the company prefers you isolated
Owners hate unions because alliances make you stronger.
The same concept applies to internal alliances.
Internal alliances may be good for you, but it may cost the company.
You can see this same conflict of interest repeated at national and government levels, as well.
The government frowns upon -or outright bans- any congregation that might potentially pose a threat to the government itself -or to its ability to collect taxes-.
4. You care about personal success, the company wants you to care about the company
If the company does well, its workers are more likely to do well.
But while it’s true that a “rising tide” lifts all boats, career strategist Brendan Reid points out that you don’t really advance much when everyone else is advancing.
Instead, crises and restructuring can offer equally good -or even better- opportunities for rapid advancement.
5. You want to advance, your company needs un-ambitious low-paid employees
Personal value is a two-edged sword for owners:
On one hand, a skilled and driven workforce is a boon.
But on the other hand, the more you improve, the more you will want to move up the corporate ladder, ask for more money or, potentially, move to another firm.
The company does want some of its employees to move upward, but not everyone.
The truth is, all companies need someone doing simple and low-paid work.
You just don’t want to be one of them.
Solution: Take all training and growth opportunities you can get
Take all training and stretch assignments you can.
This is exactly where working in a company is good from a Machiavellian point of view: you can fuck up, and not be on the hook as if you were working on your own.
6. You want to cover your ass, the company wants you to trust them
Trusting employees are more loyal, don’t waste time covering their assess, and are defenseless if things go south.
Some companies will break or bend the law when they smell that an employee can be pushed around, so be careful.
Solution: Collect Evidence
Machiavellian power move:
Leave no traces of bad conduct, while you recording all infractions from your employer.
You don’t need to use those records.
And you might not even want to use it.
As a matter of fact, I recommend you always go for win-win relationships, even with your employer.
But simply knowing that you have the power to win a lawsuit give you power and peace of mind.
The principle is:
⚖️ While your unique knowledge empowers you only, publicly shared knowledge empowers the company
Company owners want to break down and codify your skills so that that even a monkey could do what you’re doing.
So that they can hire monkeys and pay monkey salaries
BTW: monkey is terribly offensive and we reject it.
But I use it because that’s exactly how a founder I spoke to addressed his people behind closed doors.
See this example from “The Wolf of Wall Street:
Owner: So, what do you say?
Everyone: (reads from a script like a bunch of sheep)
That’s the dream of every owner: everyone is the same, and everyone is easy to replace.
Solution: Machiavellian Hoarding of Wisdom
We dig deeper on this one in Power University.
Old-Guard VS New Generation
1. You want power, they want you to be an obedient grunt
Culture has changed -luckily-.
Back in the days, the expectation was for lower-level employees to be at the beck and call of senior folks.
But the senior guys did go through that mild hazing culture.
And so today the senior guys want to have the same hazing rights over the new guys joining in.
They are also secretly resentful if you get to experience too much of an easy life and, of course, they don’t want to give up their “right” bossing you around.
That’s how you get all-too-common tropes:
- The new generation is soft
- They are entitled without giving anything (sometimes true, but not as much as some people like to parrot)
- They don’t appreciate the value of hard work
Most of the times, these are indirect cries for appreciation.
They all actually say “look at how hard I worked, how ethically I’ve played the game, and appreciate me for it”.
So throw them a bone, make them feel good, then frame yourself as a hard worker who “wants to be like them”, and you’ll be good to go.
2. The Slower They Climbed, The Slower They Want YOU to Climb
Anything less will make them feel bad about themselves.
3. You Want More Flexibility, They Want You to Sweat Blood and Tears
I remember years ago, when I was “SHINE talent graduate”.
We were presenting new ideas to the board comprised of all the most powerful heads of our IT center.
My idea was to change the policies around home office. “We should remove the 2 days cap a week, and scrap the need for the manager’s prior approval“, I opined.
That way, I argued, we could attract and keep more talent.
I had data: the new generations considered flexibility as important as salary.
And if people abused the system, we could easily identify the bad apples to let go.
The answer from the board?
A big laugh.
“These new guys want to come to work and chill with a beer”, said the biggest boss.
And all the other yes-men joined in.
Of course: they did NOT have flexibility during their career.
So they resented people who could now enjoy or, sacrilege, demand it!
It was my mistake, of course.
The mistake was in the framing of the request.
I should have framed it more as a win for the company.
And I should have paid homage to hard work and the importance of face-to-face interaction as well, a wink to the “real” way of doing business, the way they did it.
Machiavellian twist: I could have joined them in laughing “at the new grads”.
“But if this new generation wants to stay home with their moms, let’s give it to them, and we’ll even save money in office space“.
See the persuasion power move?
You power-align with them, pretending to laugh at the people who instead you’re going to help. That’s Machiavellianism for win-win.
Individuals VS Team
Those whom the company frames as your closest brothers… Are also your biggest competitors.
That picture says a lot about the conflicts of interest at work.
Especially, about the inherent conflicts between “teamwork” and the obviously limited opportunities for career advancement.
1. You want to be promoted, and all your colleagues want to be promoted
… But you must pretend you’re still all friends and teammates.
2. You gain by keeping the best information, while your colleagues want to learn as much as possible from you
The better than the rest you, are the more power you have.
But the more you teach and share, the smaller that gap becomes.
- ⛏️ Information sharing strategies: what to share, and when
The more you shine, the more you make them look average.
And the more you self-promote, the more they will resent you.
⚠️ Too nice guys feel bad to outshine and beat their colleagues
And self-sabotage themselves.
Solution: Friends With Everyone Else, Only Friend-ly With Competitors
- Be a professional, not a friend. Be friendly and warm enough so they don’t turn into frenemies, but distant enough so they won’t affect your drive to compete.
- 🎓 Think and treat them as if they were already your reports 🧠
4. You want to be close to your boss, the team prefers you to stay away from him
The closer you are to your boss, the more others will resent you as the boss’ favorite.
Solution: Be Friendly to All
If you’re very close to your boss, be warmer and more talkative to all, so it doesn’t seem you’re exclusively hobnobbing with the boss.
5. Men want to keep power, women want to upset the system
This one deserves its own post.
Also see:
And more befitting to the workplace:
Execs VS Stakeholders
This conflict of interest might be one of the best arguments against unfettered capitalism.
And it becomes especially salient during times of financial crises -especially in the banking sector-.
Then, when the ship risks going down, the captains ransack the ship leaving everyone else to hold the bag.
1. Executives want short-term profit, even if it might create problems in the future
Some classes of powerful people are incentivized to pursue short-term profits while pushing the costs onto future generations, or the public.
Politicians sometimes belong to this category.
Borrowing today, for example, helps politicians keep power, maybe even (indirectly) taking some of that money, while pushing the problem of repaying that money to the future generations (de Mesquita, 2003).
You realize you are in such a short-term profiteering environment when the bosses are pressuring people to say and do what’s expedient instead of what’s true and, in the most blatant of cases, to forego obvious standards of morals.
When that is the case, from a purely Machiavellian perspective, it’s best for you to work to help the bosses line up their pockets and interests, and that will help you make a great career.
Then you can move somewhere else before that ship will start sinking (bad management doesn’t make for great companies).
Note of caution:
As Bel correctly noted, you must be careful here. Because many (psychopathic) bosses try to push their employees to do illegal acts and then blackmail them and hold their careers on the line.
Or use them as scapegoats.
See an example here from the documentary “Capitalism”:
William Black: People who will give you the wrong answer, but the answer you want are invaluable and they often get promoted precisely because they are willing to say and do absurd things.
There is also a different approach possible though:
Dare to be black sheep
Alghouth challenging, it’s possible to fly higher.
William Black from the video above does pretty well for himself.
Di Pietro, the man who fought the Italian corruption system and gave birth to the huge movement called “Clean Hands” also did great as a lone fighter (and he got my first vote).
Being the lone fighter is riskier, and can either get you kicked out very quickly, or it can make you the leader of a new movement.
Doing so requires charisma, power awareness and… Some lucky timing.
2. Execs and owners want to privatize the gains, and collectivize the losses
Similar to the above, and the two often overlap.
The further away and the more powerless the stakeholders are, the more the few in power want to enrich themselves whilst pushing the costs to the many.
This issue is huge in politics, since politicians have access to tax money and the power of the taxpayers once parted with their money is severely limited.
Owners and shareholders often have similar incentives to cut down the costs and let the have-nots to pay the price.
The costs aren’t always a direct cost on people. Sometimes it’s indirect, paid with common goods pollution, contamination, or depletion.
That’s even easier for shareholders to pull off, since people are even more unwilling to rebel for what they don’t feel it’s even theirs.
There can be power, and even some potential personal benefits in making yourself the “leader of the forgotten good cause”. But only if you do it outside of the corporation or political party.
Doing it from within, especially if you do it too loudly, is political suicide.
Summary
Awareness of conflicts of interest forms the basis of political intelligence.
This article showed some of the main conflicts of interest among individual contributors, teams, bosses, and owners.
This knowledge empowers you to base your win-win on real-world power dynamics, rather than on naive ignorance.
❗ We teach the best strategies to advance at work in Power University❗
