The story goes back three years. Greg decided to quit his job. Ten months had passed since the team event where Greg lost his face. Despite Carl’s sarcastic remarks at that time, whenever there was a conflict with Danny, Greg would go to Carl, complaining about Danny and appealing for Danny’s dismissal. Carl pretended to listen to Greg’s arguments with ambiguous expressions on his face typically British, but he never actually responded to Greg’s appeal. Greg had no idea what was going on. Carl, who had been supporting Greg for such a long time, was not responsive when it came to Danny. Of course, Carl had been convinced by Linda that protecting Danny was the only way for him to survive in this company, so he could not listen to Greg’s argument. Even Greg did not dare to appeal to Max, the CEO’s son-in-law and the hiring manager of this trouble-maker, to fire Danny. Greg was eager to do so but he didn’t have a gut to. Everyone was reserved and couldn’t move when it came to Danny. Linda watched the theater of the fragile reality of male-dominated society, laughing. Thus, one day Greg ran out of patience and told Carl that he had found another job and was resigning.
Carl was shocked by Greg’s resignation. Greg had worked for Carl for a long time and had been very loyal to Carl. The two of them were like friends. During the major downsizing exercise a few years before, Carl defended Greg and gave him a new important position, Director of Business Intelligence, reporting directly to Carl. Carl realized that he had been behaving badly toward Greg since Danny joined the company. He was well aware that Greg was in a difficult position and that his team had to work closely with a pathetic narcissist, Danny. Aggressive Danny pushed Greg’s team to do work which he was not capable of doing, while taking all the credit for the work. It was Danny who attended Joe’s management meetings and presented the results, not Greg or his team who actually did the work. Having decided to ignore the growing frustration with the team, Carl kept hosting “team-building” events with team members including Greg and Danny, with superficial fake smiles, hoping that they could copy his fake smiles.
Bad things happened at the same time. It was during a business trip to France that Carl received a phone call from Greg about his resignation. A large industrial exhibition was being held in France. Samuel, a Frenchman Carl hated for a long time, was to have his big day as the newly inaugurated managing director of an affiliate entity within the company. Samuel, who had been newly appointed to the Head of the Mass Division, which Carl wanted so badly, was Carl’s rival and his previous subordinate. As if to add insult to Carl’s dismay of losing the nomination to Samuel for this key position, Samuel successfully delivered a Press Conference. He also did a good presentation that outlined business goals for the next years in front of a large audience. After his presentation was concluded, the audience full of a big auditorium applauded and praised him and his team.
While smiling on his face and applauding, Carl could not stop the flames of jealousy flaring up. After all, Samuel’s presentation had used much of Greg and Sanae’s work. In other words, the source was Carl’s team. And yet, Samuel never mentioned Carl’s name during his presentation. He just took the key data from Carl’s department without mentioning the source, and then he put it out as a business strategy as if he had come up with it all on his own. Actually, that was exactly what Carl had been allowing Danny to do to Greg but Carl didn’t have a chance to reflect on himself. The pain was fierce. Hearing others giving compliments to Samuel and not to him, Carl made up his mind. From that point onward, Carl should guard and protect his important assets – data and strategy implications – from Samuel’s evil hands to maintain his position as the Head of Strategy of ABCD Corporation. The greatest skills Carl had were his internal political skills to make others fail by hindering cooperation. Carl, who was once so powerful and famous in the company, had no choice but to fight for himself at the same company. Stunned by the shock of Gregg’s resignation letter and the overflow of admiration for Samuel, Carl formed his wrong belief.
Linda, on the other hand, did not miss this fantastic opportunity, the hostility getting fierce between the two parties.
When Linda was informed of Greg’s resignation, she felt that she had achieved one big milestone. As a hard-working manipulator, however, she didn’t slow down at all but took the opportunity to start full-fledged behind-the-scenes operations. She told the dispirited Carl that all of Samuel’s successes were thanks to Sanae’s work. He convinced Carl that Sanae was the one who had shared the key data from his Strategy Department with Samuel without Carl’s approval. If Sanae was left unchecked, Samuel would only use her for his own gain again to the disadvantage of Carl.
Linda said, sincerely pretending to care about Carl.
“Look, I don’t know what it is about Samuel, but he seems to like Sanae. He would have talked to Sanae only and asked her to conduct analysis for developing his own strategies, using your data assets and resources. Samuel has no respect for you at all; he bypasses you or even Greg and asks Sanae to work on things directly. How much disrespect is it? Even though things have changed recently, you are still the Head of Strategy, a very important division in the company. It’s wrong that nobody properly respects you. Sanae is getting carried away and handing over important data to Samuel, hoping that she could get some returns from Samuel. Where is the proper work line? You’d better get Sanae under control; she may be intelligent but foolish in certain things like this. Against Samuel and the Mass Division, I suggest you put Danny at the forefront of every strategic meeting even if they ask for Sanae. Danny will protect this important front-line for you. Joe will support Danny. That’s the way to keep your position in the company from Samuel’s attacks.”
Linda was angry with Sanae and any senior managers who supported her. From the beginning, she had regarded Sanae as a potential enemy and had been putting up a defensive wall. Despite that, Sanae’s recent work activities had been remarkable and she was getting attention from senior managers. Linda was painfully regretting hiring this woman. To Linda’s fury, Sanae did have great skills in data analysis and making sense of numbers, which was appreciated. She began to play an active role in a variety of fields. In particular, customer segmentation analysis was well received by various departments, which led to the increases in work requests to her from Samuel and other senior people. Furthermore, when he heard that we had begun to create a new dashboard on Net Promoter Score (NPS), a hot topic in marketing, Linda’s anger was max. She whispered to Carl.
You shouldn’t make Sanae do that work which sounds important. You have another male employee on your team, a Finnish person called Ollie, don’t you? His job title is also “Customer Analyst”, so make him do that work. If you let Sanae do it all the time, she will take advantage of it and the other department heads will try to bypass you even more. It is better to divide the workload to protect you and your department.
Ollie, who had not much skills but an arrogant attitude, declared to Sanae one day, “I’m the owner of this work from today.” However it was obvious that he did not understand anything about the dashboard creation process or tools. It was clear that things would just stall. Concerned Sanae reported the situation to Greg. Upon receiving Greg’s report, Carl informed Linda that the proposed idea had apparently not worked. Linda laughed darkly and thought,
“Stupid Sanae, you’re being a fool for resisting in vain. I will help you submit to it.”
Then Linda told Carl to promote Ollie to the same level as Sanae and she would hand over the work to him at least partially. Thus, Ollie, who happened to be there at the right time, got promoted despite lack of necessary experience. For Linda, promotion decision was based solely on whether a person would be useful to her in keeping her potential enemies away. The male employee, whose expertise aside, with a big attitude and overly confident, was Linda’s favorite type.
On the other hand, a young, talented blonde woman from Austria in an adjacent department, who had started in the company at the same time as Ollie had not been promoted at all, even though she was more competent than her peers. Of course, Linda manipulated her German department head, Peter, not to promote her. Whenever Peter’s department approached Linda about a promotion assessment for the woman, Linda would plausibly say,
“Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t see any “Leadership Potential” in her yet. Even if she won’t have any direct reports immediately, at the manager level, this should be a prerequisite for promotion. HR can’t approve a promotion until she qualifies in that. Why don’t you give her a little more time?”
It was a seemingly plausible excuse, but in reality, it was a completely meaningless criterion. It was an arbitrary decision made by personnel who did not know the candidate’s work performance. It was almost a prejudice – a young woman won’t be good for a leader role as she doesn’t look like so yet. Linda had no reason whatsoever to promote a blonde woman who was younger and better looking than herself, to tell the truth. Finally, she voluntarily left the company, which pleased Linda.
The same was true for Claudia, a Swiss young woman in the Africa Division. According to Linda’s principle, she should never promote a Swiss woman who was better educated than Linda because of obvious reasons. Moreover, Claudia spoke Chinese fluently thanks to her study and traveling to China, even though she grew up in Switzerland. By Contrast, Linda’s Chinese was non-existing. Although Linda had been assigned to China as HR Lead for the region for two years, she had no interest in the local language or culture. Hence after two years of sporadic stays in the region, she was not able to speak a single word of Chinese properly. Of course, she had written on her resume for internal use that she was fluent in Chinese, but that would be discovered in a few seconds of a conversation. A competent, well-educated Swiss woman who spoke Chinese better than herself and had worked in Africa was nothing more than a distraction to Linda. As is always the case, she had no viewpoint whether a person would be valuable for the company. It was natural that Linda kept Claudia at the entry-level rank, and turned down any other possibilities of internal move for her. Thus, disappointed, Claudia found a new job in Switzerland at the manager level and left.
ABCD Corporation did not promote female employees who did good work and consequently lost them to other companies. That was a situation that Linda found ideal for herself. Once she had moved up the promotion ladder, Linda’s most important job as HR Manager was to make sure that the ladder was thoroughly removed for other women. At the same time, Linda lamented in official meetings about the statistics on the number of women in management ranks remaining too low.
Speaking of Linda’s overstatement on resumes, Sanae also smelled it. In the Women’s Association membership roster for the company, Linda wrote she spoke Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian. On top she was proficient in French and English, with German as her native language. No one else in the Swiss office would be able to confirm this, but Sanae had noticed early on that Linda’s Japanese was non-existent, except for a few words of greetings. Sanae, who must have noticed the disparity between Linda’s gorgeous language profile on the paperwork and her actual abilities, was a major irritant to Linda. It was urgent for Linda to stop Sanae’s rapid progress and male managers noticing her abilities. Manipulation Carl might not be sufficient.Linda decided to actively manipulate another key person, Max Stepson. Linda whispered sweetly to Max.
“Samuel and his team have been apparently very critical of your team. Joe and I have received a number of rather scathing criticisms about Danny and your strategies from the Mass Division. Some of them even mentioned you; Max is not suitable for his role as he doesn’t understand their business, coming outside of the company because of a personal connection to the CEO. They are demanding that you and Danny be removed from your current positions. Of course, Samuel is afraid of you and won’t say anything directly to you. You see, they are all French, already difficult and critical to Germans. Samuel is probably jealous that you were promoted to a Vice President recently as young.”
She continued,
“Well, part of the problem may be that your marketing strategy is to shift Samuel’s mass division to the lower end of the market, targeting the general buying public. Really, though, Samuel has a lot of influence in upper management, so you should be careful. He needs to be reined in. I’m a HR person and I need to be fair to everyone. But I trust your personality and abilities as a manager and I would like you to be successful further. So I decided to take a risk and give you some advice. Don’t tell anyone that you heard it from me; just keep it to yourself. Oh another information; Samuel seems to have taken a liking to Sanae for some reason, and he has been avoiding your team and insists that he would need Sanae, instead of you guys. He even brings it up to Joe, saying that Danny and Max are out of question. It’s not proper in all the senses.”
The effect was immediate. Childish Max felt that it was very likely and danced to Linda’s manipulation. As a revenge, Max started denouncing Samuel of the division’s profit margins being stagnant in front of the others in management meetings. On the other hand, Danny’s behavior, which was clearly a personality problem, was left untouched. Max was too stubborn to accept different opinions and criticisms objectively. Nor was he able to judge objectively whether his strategies and targets set were in line with the business reality. This simple fact itself should make him unsuitable for any management positions, but nobody dared to ask this critical question, thanks to the shield by the CEO for his special status.
Linda watched the situation with amusement. Getting people she knows to fight each other is Linda’s specialty. Although she was the catalyst which caused the ignition between different parties, she pretended that she had nothing to do with it. She didn’t forget to tell to each of the two parties that she was taking their side. Hence Linda should be safe no matter which way the situation would turn and that made her further room for manipulation. The real wolf Linda was in a sheep’s costume and was sitting in the middle of her victims, who were screaming to each other.
This story is fictitious and is not based on any real persons or organizations. Copyright: Kunoichi4You 2024
Psychopath in the Next Office 