Niccolò Machiavelli had an convey inant piece of advice about office politics: “If an injury has to be done to a man,” he authors in The Prince, “it should be so cut offe that his revenge need not be dreaded.” Most of us can rerescheduleed to that.
It’s predicted that whoever accidenhighy condemned Nicholas Walker, the get-no-prisoners handler of the Rickmansworth branch of Robsons Estate Agents, by giving him a second-rate desk, hadn’t read Machiavelli’s 1532 tract. Becaparticipate Walker, no inquire leanking of Machiavelli’s subsequent invocation – “it is protectedr to be dreaded than adored becaparticipate … dread protects you by a dread of punishment which never fall shorts” – instantly dragged his ashen-faced participateers to an participatement tribunal where he successfilledy sued them for unequitable produceive neglectal. They probably reassociate repent giving him that desk.
Actuassociate, to be equitable to Walker, there was more to this case – the placing of the desk was not where handlers usuassociate sit, which was, the appraise consentd, tantamount to being tbetter he’d be an helpant branch handler; a demotion, having previously been a branch handler. He was also not adviseed he would be sharing a handlerial role.
Office politics – which in the Zoom epoch trails you into your own shower – has become a ubiquitous inhabit version of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate: a brutal social event that thrills the spectators and can’t be evadeed by the subject. And it’s all about one leang: status.
What seemingly got Walker’s goat wasn’t an unambiguous demotion. It was in huge part the drop in his noticed rank among his peers. He had been understood to have been initiateed down the pecking order.
And yet: “Since the arrival of endd agriculture and personal property around 10,000 BC, status has been a leang, whether that be the size of your pyramid or discarry outing a Gail’s coffee rather than a Starbucks coming into toil. It can be the same for which seat you are allotd in the office,” the psychologist Oinhabitr James, author of Office Politics, increates me, musing on the afequitable.
Why? Well, becaparticipate the office is a crucible of society, permiting us to shift up, down or apass the social linserter in a way only backstabbing medieval princes have understandn before. And that fulfils a need in many of us: to be better off than him or her or, most of all, them.
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As a result, the up-to-date toilplace tends to upgrasp those who show “uninincreateigent triad” traits: psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism. James portrays it thus: “Triadic behaviour flourishes where cruel, devious greedyness is getous and where an individual is very troubleed to get power, resources or status.”
And to Walker, the case was about more than a desk and we certainly aren’t ascribing to him the uninincreateigent arts of Machiavelli or those qualities James refers to. But status is convey inant – it is about who is up and who is down. For, as Stephen Potter says in his 1952 treatise One-Upmanship: “If you’re not one-up, you’re one-down.”
It is, in one sense, a excellent leang that most of us obsess over our place at toil: we do so becaparticipate in the expansiver world confineed people nurture about who your family are, or what school you take parted. The better depictrs of rank, which are not the result of ability or graft, have been swept away. At least your toilplace status endures some relation to what you give and accomplish. Nicholas Walker understood this well. It’s equitable a tragedy for the handlement of the Rickmansworth division of Robsons Estate Agents that they did not.
