
Margay cat (Leopardus wiedii). The Margay, also known as a tree ocelot, mimics the calls for help emitted by monkeys and other primates. After luring them within range, the Margay attacks and often secures a meal. Image (cc) by SA 3.0 by Malene Thyssen, courtesy WikiPedia.
When someone asks us for help, we sometimes have a positive, warm, emotional response. We can feel valued, flattered, respected, or appreciated. And often, these feelings fit the situation. The request for help validates our ability to contribute to the group effort. These feelings can be especially strong when we've had little contact with the people seeking help because these requests indicate something about our reputations.
Feeling respected and valued when you are actually respected and valued is an absolute good.
But people seek help for many reasons. Some do seek the help they're asking for, but some have other agendas. When people seek help for reasons other than the reasons they claim, there is a risk that destructive politics is afoot.
Below is a Feeling respected and valued when
you are actually respected and
valued is an absolute goodlittle catalog of situations that motivate people to ask for help for reasons beyond the help they appear to be seeking. It's useful to understand these situations, what motivates people to behave this way, and what you can do about these fake requests for help. In what follows, I'll refer to the seeker of help as Sandra or Stephen, and the seeker's target as Tom or Tilly. Finally, I refer to the task in question as Marigold.
- Offloading work
- Getting someone else to do his work is one motive that comes to mind when trying to explain why Stephen might ask for help. He might be overloaded. But he might also dislike the kind of work Marigold now requires. Or he perhaps anticipates a schedule conflict with some other task he prefers, or a conflict with a personal matter he doesn't want to disclose.
- Transferring or distributing risk
- Sandra might sense that working on Marigold entails some political risk that she would rather not bear. By enlisting Tom's assistance, she hopes to create an opportunity to mitigate some the risk by transferring it, in whole or in part, to Tom. She might later be able to assert, "Oh, yes, that's the part of the work that Tom is doing."
- Creating delays
- Stephen might have an interest in delaying Marigold without being personally responsible for the delays. For example, one of Stephen's allies might be an advocate of an initiative that rivals Marigold strategically. By transferring some of the task to Tilly, Stephen hopes to slow progress in an excusable way for two reasons. First, Tilly is very busy with other work. And second, she's unfamiliar with the current status of Marigold and she'll need some time to familiarize herself with the task.
- Flattering the target
- Sandra might or might not actually need help with marigold, but by asking Tom to help with the project, she hopes to flatter him — to communicate to him that she values and respects his contributions. Whether or not she actually feels that way is unimportant. Her request for help isn't sincere, and Tom would do well to maintain a skeptical stance with respect to Sandra's requests.
- Concealing ignorance or incompetence
- Among the more devious motives for Stephen to ask for help is his desire to conceal his inability to perform the work due to ignorance or incompetence. By recruiting Tilly, he can shift to her any part of the work that he doesn't understand. He might work alongside her if he wants to cast her in the role of tutor, to learn what he can, but that would be a relatively rare variant of this motive. More likely, he just wants Tilly to do the work, and then claim credit for much of her effort.
Last words
In Nature, these strategies are categorized as aggressive mimicry. For example, the margay cat has been observed emitting calls that emulate the calls for help among monkeys. When other monkeys approach, the cat attacks and often secures a meal. In the realm of organizational politics, people who use strategies like those described above are, in a sense, engaging in aggressive mimicry for purpose of predation. Top
Next Issue
Is every other day a tense, anxious, angry misery as you watch people around you, who couldn't even think their way through a game of Jacks, win at workplace politics and steal the credit and glory for just about everyone's best work including yours? Read 303 Secrets of Workplace Politics, filled with tips and techniques for succeeding in workplace politics. More info
Your comments are welcome
Would you like to see your comments posted here? rbrenZLkFdSHmlHvCaSsuner@ChacbnsTPttsdDaRAswloCanyon.comSend me your comments by email, or by Web form.About Point Lookout
Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.
Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.
Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.
Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.
Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
Top Ten Signs of a Blaming Culture
- The quality of an organization's culture is the key to high performance. An organization with a blaming
culture can't perform at a high level, because its people can't take reasonable risks. How can you tell
whether you work in a blaming culture?
Projection Errors at Work
- Often, at work, we make interpretations of the behavior of others. Sometimes we base these interpretations
not on actual facts, but on our perceptions of facts. And our perceptions are sometimes erroneous.
Embarrassment, Shame, and Guilt at Work: Coping
- Coping effectively with feelings of embarrassment, shame, or guilt is the path to recovering a sense
of balance that's the foundation of clear thinking. And thinking clearly at work is important if you
want to avoid feeling embarrassment, shame, or guilt.
Do My Job
- A popular guideline in modern workplaces is "do your job." The idea is that if we all do our
jobs, success is most likely. But some supervisors demand that subordinates do their own jobs, plus
the jobs of their supervisors. It rarely works out well.
Cyber Rumors in Organizations
- Rumor management practices in organizations haven't kept up with rumor propagation technology. Rumors
that propagate by digital means — cyber rumors — have longer lifetimes, spread faster, are
more credible, and are better able to reinforce each other.
See also Workplace Politics and Devious Political Tactics for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming March 29: Time Slot Recycling: The Risks
- When we can't begin a meeting because some people haven't arrived, we sometimes cancel the meeting and hold a different one, with the people who are in attendance. It might seem like a good way to avoid wasting time, but there are risks. Available here and by RSS on March 29.
And on April 5: The Fallacy of Division
- Errors of reasoning are pervasive in everyday thought in most organizations. One of the more common errors is called the Fallacy of Division, in which we assume that attributes of a class apply to all members of that class. It leads to ridiculous results. Available here and by RSS on April 5.
Coaching services
I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrenZLkFdSHmlHvCaSsuner@ChacbnsTPttsdDaRAswloCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.
Get the ebook!
Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:
- Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
- Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
- Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
- Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
- Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
- Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )
Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info
Follow Rick





Recommend this issue to a friend
Send an email message to a friend
rbrenZLkFdSHmlHvCaSsuner@ChacbnsTPttsdDaRAswloCanyon.comSend a message to Rick
A Tip A Day feed
Point Lookout weekly feed
