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Key points
- We can't just rely on our own actions to succeed; we need others to support us and not get in our way.
- Self-perception can be easily damaged by saboteurs. Influence yourself before seeking to influence others.
- Prove to colleagues who you are by your actions and engagement. Don't let others sully your reputation.
- Speak directly to saboteurs and understand what they are trying to achieve and how you can work together.
As much as we’d like to think that success in our careers is in our own hands, the truth is that the people who work with and around us significantly influence our ability to reach our potential. They can lift us up and provide us with support, guidance, and advocacy, helping us navigate difficult challenges. Or they can stall our progress, withholding their cooperation, briefing against us, and obstructing key projects.
There may be perfectly understandable reasons for people withholding their support for you, including a clash of personalities, professional jealousy, or their own personal ambition. Or their motivations may be more opaque. It’s important to remember that you cannot be held responsible for other people’s feelings or actions; you simply need to focus on who you are when you turn up to work and how you engage with them.
While not taking responsibility for their behaviour, you will want to do everything you can to prevent people from trying to sabotage your success. You can do so by focusing on some key professional relationships.
Your Relationship With Yourself
Andrew Bryant, author of Self Leadership and The New Leadership Playbook, stresses that everything begins with the relationship you have with yourself. He explains, “The challenge with saboteurs is that they challenge our own self-perception. As a leader, it is very important to have a strong sense of self-awareness and an acceptance that other people's perception of you is not you.
“You need to develop that sense of ‘this is me; this is what I’m trying to achieve’ and accept that not everyone’s going to get that.”
One way saboteurs in the workplace win is by making you doubt yourself and your direction. There’s nothing wrong with listening to feedback and adapting your ideas and plans appropriately, but great leaders need to have the courage to make decisions that won’t be popular with everyone but are badly needed.
Bryant believes that leadership rests on a clear conviction and vision. “You have to be very clear who you are, what you stand for, where you’re going. And accept that it’s not popular.
“Once you have accepted yourself, then you can move to your strategies, which is getting buy-in to the collective outcome. If you can’t influence yourself, you can’t influence anybody else.”
Your Relationship With Your Team and Colleagues
One particularly underhand and unpleasant way saboteurs can undermine you is to impact your reputation. By talking about you with colleagues and accusing you of untrue actions or intent, they can potentially inflict a lot of damage on your standing.
If you let them.
Just standing back and professing innocence won’t change the narrative. Actions speak louder than words, so let your colleagues and team members make their own minds up about you based on their personal experience.
As a leader, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing purely on the vision you want to achieve and working to get everyone to fall into line behind you. That makes it easy for saboteurs to paint you as overly ambitious, self-centred, or out of touch.
You win people over to your vision by ensuring that they feel listened to and heard first. Park your agenda for a while and focus on each individual on your team. Be curious, find out what’s important to them, what they want to achieve, and what their vision for the team and organisation is. We’ve explored before how curiosity and active listening help to develop trust and engagement.
Become an advocate for your colleagues, helping them to achieve their objectives and advance their careers. When you listeni to and support them, it will become much more challenging for bad actors to sully your reputation by trying to share a narrative about you that conflicts with the personal experience of the people around you.
Your Relationship With Your Saboteurs
Possibly the least attractive option (particularly for those who don’t like to face difficult conversations), but an essential one to face, is a conversation with the people currently obstructing your progress.
Jo Geraghty, a Director of Culture Consultancy ltd and advisor to CEOs and Chief People Officers on business culture, stresses that people don’t consciously set out to be a problem. Perceived sabotage often stems from misaligned perspectives rather than malicious intent.
“People don’t typically get up in the morning and decide to sabotage someone else’s career”, Geraghty says. “Their actions have been created by various factors, including their life experience, work experience, personality, and intrinsic motivations.
“You need to open up a dialogue and understand the other person’s perspective in a way that allows you to get an insight into their belief systems, values, and where they are coming from.
“It could be that they’ve seen this initiative a thousand times before and they’re jaded by it. Perhaps the last time something like this came along, they threw themselves into it and were burned because it didn’t go anywhere. Maybe they were promised something in return for their involvement and didn’t get it.”
Such conversations won’t always be easy, and you may find that the relationship is so damaged that they simply don’t want to engage. In such cases, you may want to involve a mediator, such as their line manager or someone from the HR team. But the effort is worth it. Ultimately, if you can identify the reasons for their sabotage and find a way to move forward to your mutual benefit, you can turn a saboteur into your biggest advocate, and they can help you move closer towards your goal rather than trying to push you away from it.
