An office can be a snake pit. As they writhe around day after day in a forced atmosphere of competition, vanity, intensity, frustration and boredom, it is no wonder workers lose perspective.
Irrational jealousy is bad for mental health and productivity. But what if we could turn our tendency for workplace envy into something productive, even profitable?
It may seem counterintuitive, but new research from Harvard Business School suggests that might be possible.
Competition at work is hard to deal with, even for those with dazzling careers.
Just as imposter syndrome has been faced down, along comes someone younger, cooler, more talented, more qualified, whose grabby ideas are even more eye-catching to the boss.
In an interim paper, Alison Wood Brooks and a team of organisational psychologists have set out how envy at work can be mitigated and put to good use.
They found it all depends on our ability to talk about workplace triumphs and tragedies to colleagues.
“It was astounding to me that people are so prone to reveal and trumpet their successes,” says Prof Wood Brooks.
“We have created a working culture where we see lives through a skewed lens — and we are missing out on half the real picture.” According to the researchers, envy at work comes in two varieties: “malicious” and “benign”. The first is bad: a colleague has been promoted, and a peer’s response is a demoralising, blind fury.
But the second is good — for individuals and productivity: a colleague has been promoted, and not only do peers aspire to reach their level, they also believe they can. How do we turn the first into the second?
One way, the psychologists found, was for successful people to temper hubris with a dose of self-deprecation. Specifically, talk openly about failures.
When we do that, colleagues’ envy becomes something akin to aspiration: if we believe the people around us have achieved only through merit and after hard slog, we tend to believe we can do the same. That makes everyone work harder.
The problem is that very few people do it.
Of a sample of about 150 people, the chances that one of them was hiding an inconvenient failure as it was happening were more than 41 per cent, while the chances they were hiding success were just 8 per cent.
And once those failures were in the past, the study group were even more likely to bury them: the probability of hiding old failures shifted to 62 per cent, while the probability of talking about past success was 79 per cent.
In other words, we are overwhelmingly likely to hide disasters, botched jobs and dropped balls when they occur, and far less likely to talk about failures than successes after the event.
The psychologists also found that unless self-promotion is tempered with humility, it leads to colleagues feeling terrible about themselves and, by extension, to malicious envy (that bad kind again).
That is because those on the receiving end of hubris are highly likely to compare their full wealth of experiences — a motley rag bag of successes and failures — to the triumphs of the sun king or queen before them.
We hide failures at work for a good reason: because we think it is risky to reveal them. But think again, say the researchers: the risk of talking about just one or two moderate past failures is low, compared with the disastrous consequences for everyone of widespread malicious envy.
When we reveal failures in addition to success, we mitigate the bad kind. And we can always select those failures we choose to reveal. People at work — and their bosses — overestimate the consequences of self-promotion.
But how to pull off self-deprecation without sounding patronising or phoney? Says Prof Wood Brooks: “Choose your moment carefully.
And when colleagues congratulate you, say it wasn’t completely easy. Reveal one small thing that was negative on the path to success — an early rejection for promotion, say, or a sharp rebuke from a boss.”
Business schools — Harvard in particular — are hyper-competitive places. Will she be regaling colleagues with a list of her own failures?
“Umm . . . ” she says. “Only after I’ve achieved tenure.” THE FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Helen Barrett is the FT Work & Careers editor. She writes on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, business education and working life.