The Colleague Who Takes the Blame and Makes You Pay For It | Ep 6

A senior analyst hasn't raised her voice in a meeting in four years. Her recommendation gets passed over and she agrees, pleasantly, that the other approach is probably better. Then the work she owes the person whose approach won arrives late, arrives thin, and arrives with a note explaining that she didn't want to overstep.

A department head takes the blame for a lost bid in front of his own director. Everybody present agrees that was admirable. Two of his team later describe it as the worst afternoon of the year because he spent the rest of that day making it very clear in a series of individually reasonable conversations whose fault it actually was.

A program manager sends an email at 11 o'clock at night correcting a small error in a document somebody else wrote nine days earlier, copying in two people who didn't need to be copied. Not one of those is an actionable grievance, but all three cost somebody something. I want Here's what makes that pattern of behaviour expensive.

Every incident is small enough to absorb, so nobody calls it out. And because nobody calls it out, everybody around it adjusts instead. They stop volunteering. They put in writing what would have taken a minute to say. They decide a piece of work isn't worth the conversation it would need. None of that shows up in an engagement survey as distress.

A year of it reads as a difficult team rather than a difficult person and it usually gets described that way in exit interviews. Most of us have a name ready for this, the quiet one, the passive aggressive one. However, the research on the quiet form says something almost nobody expects and it changes who you should be watching.

Now, I will The research name for this trait-related behaviour is vulnerable narcissism. That's the term to search for, and it's close to the last time the phrase will do any work in this episode, because the label is where all the damage in this territory gets done. Let's start with what it's not. It's not anxiety, though from the outside the two can look identical.

It's not introversion, which is a preference about where somebody does their best thinking and carries no hostility towards anyone at all. It's not narcissistic personality disorder, meaning the clinical condition, diagnosed by a qualified clinician with access to the person over time, and not something a colleague can assess in a meeting.

And it's not the loud, self-promoting form I covered in the last episode. Now the deflating part, which is also one of the best evidenced findings in the literature. When researchers took the standard questionnaire apart and asked what it's actually made of, roughly two-thirds of it turned out to be ordinary emotional instability, and about a fifth, low agreeableness.

So most of what those ten questions capture is a quality nobody would think to make a video about. The interesting part is the fraction left over. It's small, and it's what the rest of this episode is about. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank In what sense is this version of the trait the same as the loud version, grandiose narcissism?

The answer is, it's not really. One analysis pooled the individual answers of more than 18,000 people across 45 separate groups, with its plan lodged publicly before the data were examined. That analysis found that the relationship between the two forms of narcissism isn't the same at every point on the spectrum.

Among people at ordinary levels, the two traits sit almost entirely apart, whereas with people at the extreme top, vulnerable narcissism climbs alongside grandiose narcissism instead of falling away. This means the folklore claim that underneath every confident person there's a fragile one is wrong about almost everybody, but right about a small group of people at the far end of the spectrum.

What the two versions genuinely share is antagonism, a settled disposition to treat other people as obstacles rather than as parties with claims of their own. That's the part that produces a behaviour everybody else has to deal with, and the quietness may be strategy or may simply be temperament related.

And there's another difference worth knowing about. Working with almost 2,500 people, researchers found that the 10-question measure divides into two halves that have surprisingly little to do with each other. One half is sensitivity to being judged, the other is self-centredness. Only the second behaves like a dark trait at all, and most of us know somebody who's very much the first without being remotely like the second.

Now for the finding that reframes the problem. 344 managers answered questions about both trait forms, and their scores were set against 7 published samples drawn from the general population. The managers came out higher on the loud form and lower on the quiet one. So if you spent the last 4 minutes picturing your boss, the probability is against you.

On this evidence, the person a description fits most closely is more likely to be a peer, somebody at your own level in another function, or somebody who reports to you. There may be a reason for that, and for clarity it's an argument rather than a finding, because nobody has tested it. Job promotion tends to reward visible confidence in front of people who do not know you well, claiming credit early and in public, and an appetite for exposure.

Somebody who takes an offhand remark home with them at the end of the day may find all that intolerable rather than energising, which would mean the process is filtering for comfort in a room rather than for character. Inside that same group, the researchers asked what each form predicted about three kinds of work performance.

The loud form predicted none of the three. The quiet form predicted two, more of the behaviour that damages an organisation, and less of the job as written. One caveat, that was a single group of managers answering questions about themselves, including questions about their own damaging behaviour, which is not the strongest or most reliable form of evidence available on any question.

I think the leopard stand has been explained in front of me because the์ Picture what the researchers put in front of their participants, because it's deliberately ordinary and it's doing all the work. You lead a sales and marketing department of five teams. One of those teams has just failed to win a significant piece of business and an email has arrived from the unhappy client.

In one version the email makes clear that the failure was yours. In another it makes clear the failure belonged to the team leader who reports to you. In a third it says nothing about whose fault anything was, leaving you to work it out for yourself. The researchers asked what you would do to the team leader sitting downstream of you.

The answer depended almost entirely on which of those three emails had arrived and on where you sat on one particular set of personality questions. Almost everybody assumes that the manager who lashes out is the manager who ducks the blame. It's an assumption with a certain moral tidiness to it, because it lets the aggression and the arrogance be one failing rather than two.

Meanwhile the evidence points the other way. the One research team proposed a different route, tested it three times in two countries, used three different designs and involved 938 supervisors in total. Across all three studies, the leaders who reported treating their people worse were the ones higher on the quiet form of narcissism.

The researchers repeated every analysis for the loud form and in their own words, the results didn't replicate for grandiose narcissism. The route runs like this. A failure arrives, the leader takes it internally and decides it says something about the kind of person they are. That produces shame and the shame then gets relieved in the only direction available, which is downwards at somebody who can't easily object.

Shame is a specific emotion doing the work here and it's separate from guilt because the two get used as synonyms and behave nothing alike. Guilt is about what you did and it points to repairing it. Shame is about what the thing proves you are and it points to getting out of the room. There's not much anybody can do with shame except deny it, avoid everybody who witnessed it or attack whoever seems to be holding it up in front of them.

Only the last of these is available to somebody who has to chair the same meeting again on Thursday. Let's see that's pray's Here's the result to carry forward of this episode. The third study ran in the United Kingdom with 292 supervisors and it replaced the imagined situation with a real one. Each participant was asked to recall an actual recent mistake involving one of their own people and to describe it in detail before answering anything else.

The link between the trait and hostile treatment appeared when the participant was left to work out the blame for themselves. It vanished when the instruction told them the failure was theirs. Think about that for a moment because it's the opposite of what the folk model predicts. Telling a leader that the failure was theirs did not make things worse for the person downstream.

Leaving it open did. There are limits to this because this research reflects early work. Overstating conclusions now could be expensive later. The hostile treatment was reported by the leaders themselves rather than by the people on the receiving end and no study has yet asked the people underneath.

The shame step held in the second study but did not hold in the third. The researchers say so themselves which is a good sign about the researchers' integrity and a reason to keep an open mind about the results. Thank you. Two more numbers from one of the largest evidence bases in this area. A pooled analysis of 437 separate studies covering more than 123,000 people.

First, every side of narcissism they examined, including the quiet one, was related to aggression. That's not what the popular account predicts, which is that the quiet one suffers and the loud one harms. This makes a tidy story, but doesn't survive contact with the data of the 437 studies. The second finding is the one to take forward.

The link was about twice as strong when the person had been provoked compared to when they had not. Provocation here doesn't mean anything dramatic. Being ignored counts, being left out counts. So does a reply that comes back in four words when the message took 20 minutes to write. This matters because the most common provocations in an office setting are administrative rather than personal, and usually nobody's decision in particular.

The meeting invitation that goes to seven people and not the eighth. The decision taken in a corridor and announced in a room. The document that circulates with somebody's contribution folded into a section under another name. Not one of those was about anybody. It arrived anyway. And what you can change isn't the person.

It's how much interpretive work that you leave them to do. The Vive. so what can you actually do first three things not to do because that's where most damage gets done do not reassure harder when somebody says this is all my fault in a tone that invites contradiction most of us reach for some version of don't be silly it was nobody's fault it's kind it's cheap and it reaches neither of the two steps that matter nothing here suggests these people lack reassurance a failure has already become a verdict about the kind of person they are and a warm generality can't touch a verdict because a verdict only responds to specifics do not screen for it two-thirds of what the standard questionnaire captures is ordinary emotional instability and only one of its two halves behaves like a dark trait a selection process built on that assessment instrument would screen out anxious people at a higher rate than antagonistic ones under a misleading label that's far more rigorous sounding than it is in reality and finally do not try to treat it managing behavior is a manager's job reaching whatever produces it is somebody else's and the attempt goes badly for everybody is a LSB Now, four things that may help, provided with the understanding that these have not been confirmed and are therefore not evidence-based.

This is consistent with my approach to reporting evidence-based research. Firstly, when something goes wrong, name what happened and what caused it in specific and plain terms before anybody can turn it into a verdict about a person. Not, these things happen, which is a generality and settles nothing.

Instead, the client changed the specification in week three and we didn't reprice, so the margin had gone before the pitch. Be specific, because a verdict can only be displaced by an account of the situation more detailed than the verdict. Warm platitudes are not detail. Act quickly, because by the time somebody has decided what a failure proves about them, you're arguing with a conclusion rather than preventing one.

One version of this goes wrong and it's the version most managers reach for first. A list of causes so long that nobody could be responsible reads as managing the room and it'll be interpreted as somebody who's been protected. What you say has to be true, accurate and short enough to be believed. A list of causes so long that nobody will know possible Benito, cada mutal, a heartbeat can only be accused of seeing as many Secondly, shame is about being seen, which is what separates it from guilt One experiment bears on this directly People high on the trait felt more shame than those low on it After receiving disappointing feedback on a task they thought they'd done well Bear in mind that this is just one experiment, so treat it accordingly The consequence is not to soften the criticism Which leaves the recipient unclear about what was said It's to hold the content steady and shrink the audience So the correction happens one-to-one rather than in a team meeting Correcting one person in a group saves you time And borrows it from the person who then spends a fortnight deciding what it meant Notice the tension with the first move, which asks for public account Both can hold The account of what went wrong is public The criticism of an individual is private Keeping those two on different channels is the whole skill The third move follows from a provocation finding And it's the least intuitive line here The natural response to a colleague who is hard to read Is to withdraw politely And every way of withdrawing is ambiguous by design The vague excuse The unanswered message The meeting held without them Each avoids a scene And each is closer to the input that produces one The vague excuse costs you more than the clear no The The fourth move is one I would keep if I had to drop the other three.

It's also practitioner judgement rather than research, and no study has tested it. Everything so far speaks to whoever is managing the situation and who holds authority over it. The finding at the centre of this episode concerns somebody having a hard time and then transferring it onto people with less power.

Only the second half of that is anybody else's business. So the first question is really how to help the person in the middle. Ask instead who is absorbing the transfer, whether they have anywhere to take it, and who writes the report on that team that reaches the level above. Usually it is, and that's what turns a personal challenge into an organisational problem.

Now the part most videos on this subject don't cover, there's no tested way of handling this. None of the four moves has been researched. The research is reasonably strong on the mechanism. and close to silent on what to do once you've found it. The newest evidence complicates things rather than simplifying them.

A study published this year asked 442 employees to rate their own leader. The withdrawn, isolating side of the quiet form went with higher engagement, not lower. Neither side of trait narcissism was related to exhaustion at all. Lots of Next week I'm covering the thing that makes all of this harder.

The people who've known somebody longest are usually right about them and you didn't believe them. Look out for episode 7. One last thing about today's episode. Everything here is a statement about groups. Not one of these studies promotes drawing a conclusion about the colleague you may have been thinking about while watching.

Research can change what you expect and what you can try first. It can't tell you what's going on inside a person. Thank Three more things and then we're done. The written version of this episode is on my website. Every reference, each verification status and the four things I still don't know. If you want to check anything I've said, you can find it there.

The link is in the description and on screen now. Please like and subscribe if you want the rest of the series. This series is working through the antagonistic core, one form at a time and each weekly episode assumes the one before it. I want to think from you because you can answer it and the literature can't.

When something went wrong recently where you work, did anybody say out aloud what had caused it or was that left for people to work out? That second one is the condition this evidence says to watch and I'd like to know how common it is. I'm Dr Nick Kecker. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next one.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank