When Mario joined Dr. Levine’s research group, he was familiar with his new boss’s previous research but hadn’t yet formed a full opinion of him professionally, nor did Mario know anything about Dr. Levine personally. In his first few weeks in Dr. Levine’s group, Mario concentrated on his work and on being productive and made no efforts to socialize with other members of the research group. Not surprisingly, he came across as antisocial, aloof, and socially challenged. Having always been a one-man show when it came to doing research, Mario made no effort to establish collaborations with the other researchers and students. Although he was familiar with and admired the work done by some of these people, his failure to communicate with them and let them know that he appreciated their work made them feel that he looked down on it. They saw Mario’s failure to engage with others as an expression of arrogance. As a result, he was disliked by everyone in the group and had no support. For Mario, being socially challenged, this wasn’t a problem: when he found himself in a group of “friends,” half the time he couldn’t tell whether anyone liked him or not, and the rest of the time he knew that no one liked him but didn’t care. Moreover, when it came to school and later to work, he was firmly convinced that his potential for success depended entirely on himself, his skills, his dedication, and the quality of his work. He didn’t think that networking or friendships had anything to do with advancing his career. He also had little respect for authority derived from prestige and political power and couldn’t stand people who pulled rank on him. He believed that in the intellectual arena authority must be earned from confrontations of ideas and that anyone could—and should—be challenged.
And so virtually from the day he started working in Dr. Levine’s group, Mario began challenging his boss in endless discussions of their research, citing the strengths and weaknesses of Dr. Levine’s articles versus Mario’s own papers. He put himself on the same intellectual level as Dr. Levine and tested the strength and quality of his own ideas and work directly against those of Dr. Levine. Needless to say, Dr. Levine didn’t like this at all. He thought that although this young man was somewhat smart and knowledgeable, he was far too opinionated and self-assured given the tenuousness of his previous experience and accomplishments. Although Dr. Levine occasionally thought that the discussions with Mario were interesting, most of the time he was annoyed. He had no interest in being intellectually stimulated if he wasn’t going to get the respect a senior researcher like him deserved from this arrogant young man.
After the first few discussions, Mario began to feel that his ideas and work were as good as, if not better than, those of Dr. Levine, and he developed a keen sense of injustice that his boss was a highly paid and respected professor while he himself was merely an underpaid young researcher. One day, in the middle of a particularly heated argument, Mario told Dr. Levine outright that his thinking and research were seriously flawed. He also told his boss that he thought he could do a much better job running the laboratory than Dr. Levine did.
All hell broke loose. Dr. Levine yelled at Mario and told him to pack up and start looking for another job. Mario came back and called him incompetent. As these words came out of his mouth, however, he was suddenly intimidated by authority and feared for the future of his career. He eventually apologized to Dr. Levine. After that, he left the room and the research group with his tail between his legs. Everyone soon heard what had happened, and the specific words exchanged in the argument passed from mouth to mouth as though the conversation had been secretly recorded. Although some researchers in Dr. Levine’s group shared Mario’s concerns about the quality of their leader’s ideas and research, they were so happy to see the young offender gone that they uniformly sided with their boss.
After leaving Dr. Levine’s group, Mario worked at home, and it took him a long time to find another research job. Did he learn his lesson and swear to rethink his behavior in the future? Not really. But he conceded that his approach to the situation hadn’t been well thought out. If he found himself fighting for status with a higher-ranking researcher later in his life, maybe his approach would work. But at this early stage of his career, he would have to be patient.
THE MACHIAVELLIAN STRATEGIST
One year after Gina joined Microsoft, Sarah, an experienced midlevel business manager in her late forties, was recruited to Microsoft from SunSystems. Sarah was given an office two doors away from Gina’s, so Gina had an opportunity to observe how her new colleague—who had a reputation for being ambitious and successful—navigated the waters of her new working environment.
One week before Sarah began working at Microsoft, everyone in Gina’s department received an email from Sarah in which she introduced herself, briefly described her background and interests, and expressed how excited she was about the prospect of working at Microsoft and, in particular, joining Gina’s department. In each email, Sarah mentioned that she owned an old German shepherd named Buck. She was very attached to him, she wrote, and hoped some of her future coworkers shared her love for dogs and would be interested in walking their dogs together. In each email, there was also a line or two individually addressing the recipient: for example, Sarah told Gina that she thought they had a common interest in yoga and they should get together soon for lunch so they could talk about it. A few days after she began her new job, Sarah took all of her closest coworkers, one by one—including Gina, the employee at the bottom of the pecking order—out to lunch. During lunch, Sarah was attentive to everything the other person said. She detailed the professional interests that she had in common with her new colleague and discussed opportunities for pursuing joint projects in which they might both benefit professionally.
In reality, Sarah had no interests—personal or professional—in common with any of her new coworkers. She did have an old dog named Buck, but she paid a professional pet-sitter to walk him every day and happily left him in a kennel for days, sometimes weeks, when she traveled out of town, which she did quite often. From Sarah’s perspective, the real purpose of these lunch conversations was twofold. First, she wanted to make a good first impression on everyone; she had learned from previous experience how important first impressions are and how things generally go better in the workplace if you are liked by everyone else. People are much more willing to do you favors, for example. Sarah also had a big ego—being loved by everyone was something she expected regardless of who the other people were.
The second, and more important, goal of these lunch conversations was to gather information on her new department and the people who worked in it. She wanted to find out quickly how much power and influence everyone had and identify both the dynamics of power and the key players and marginal characters: the winners and losers, who was going up and who was going down, who was friends or enemies with whom and for what reason. She also wanted to find out more about her coworkers’ personalities and career trajectories, their personal and professional strengths and weaknesses, so that she could either exploit these people or protect herself from them in the future, if and when the need arose. During this information-gathering phase of her strategy, Sarah accepted every invitation she received from her coworkers, whether it was to a cocktail or dinner party or a professional group within the company. She simply wanted to show everyone what a nice person and good team player she was and get all the information she needed to prepare for the second phase of her strategy.
Sarah had transferred between companies before and knew how important this information-gathering phase was for strategic career advancement. Her goal was to become a high-ranking executive at Microsoft, but unlike Gina, she wasn’t going to wait for things to happen on their own. She was going to take control and make things happen on her own terms. Although Sarah could be very self-absorbed and ruthless with others, she had learned that it’s always bad to make enemies in the workplace. You never know who you might need one day, and it’s always better to have the loyalty and support of everyone around you—even the people who don’t count much. Sarah h
ad learned from experience that low-status coworkers could cause a lot of damage to the career of someone they didn’t like by spreading malicious gossip. And someone as socially savvy as Sarah could obtain everyone’s loyalty with a relatively small investment made at the beginning. Sarah wanted to rise to the top quickly, and she knew that given her personality and her skills with people, this could be best accomplished through politics: alliance formation and social manipulation.
After about a month, Sarah had had lunch and socialized with all of her coworkers, who were already commenting among themselves about what a nice and competent person she was. What a great addition she was to the department and to the company! If only their department director could be someone like Sarah, they sighed.
At this point, Sarah switched to phase two of her strategy. After she identified a couple of key players in the department—people whose support she needed to rise quickly to the top—she began focusing her efforts on them. She quickly became indifferent to all the others, beginning with people like Gina, although she continued to smile politely at them. Sarah also quietly withdrew from all the commitments she had made to various social and professional initiatives; they were a waste of her precious time.
Sarah aggressively pursued alliances with the most powerful administrators, using any means at her disposal, from offering them professional favors to socializing, even flirting a little with one guy who seemed attracted to her. She realized that these colleagues also had some concerns about their department director; Sarah amplified these concerns by sharing some negative gossip she had heard about him at her previous company. The rest of the department didn’t seem to notice the change in Sarah’s behavior. She had made a good first impression, and obviously nobody expected that her lunch invitations would continue forever. It was understandable that as Sarah became busier with her new job, she would withdraw from some of the commitments she had made earlier, and soon everyone forgot about Buck the dog and his pressing need for canine companionship. In her aggressive pursuit of power, Sarah actually contributed to decisions that hurt Gina and other low-ranking employees, but they didn’t notice it or simply didn’t want to believe it.
In the end, Sarah’s political strategies paid off. Less than one year after she joined the company, the director of her department was involved in a scandal that led to doubts about his ability to continue serving in his position. Although many people in the department continued to support him, Sarah convinced her close allies that the director was unfit for his job and had to go. At a business meeting, Sarah and her allies launched a concerted attack and eventually forced him to resign his position and quit the company. When the names of possible successors were discussed, Sarah’s name was usually the first one mentioned, and she was immediately offered the position. She humbly accepted the new appointment, which came with a great deal of new decisional power and tripled her previous salary. At this point, Sarah began phase three of her strategy: she started spreading rumors about Steve Ballmer and his deficiencies as the CEO of Microsoft.
Monkey Stories
THE UNOBTRUSIVE IMMIGRANT
Billy was a four-year-old rhesus macaque male living on Cayo Santiago, a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico.1 On this island, there is a population of about one thousand monkeys, who live in six different groups. The groups are ranked in a linear dominance hierarchy: Group Alpha, the largest group with almost three hundred individuals, is the top-ranking group, while Group Omega, which numbers only thirty-eight individuals, is the lowest-ranking. The small groups try to stay out of the way of the high-ranking ones as much as possible, but occasionally encounters do occur. These encounters between groups may result in intense battles, but they also provide opportunities for young males to check out attractive females in other groups, espy in these groups any family members who emigrated years earlier, and gather information that will help them make decisions about which group to join when the time comes for their own emigration.
Billy belonged to the fifth-ranking group, and within this group he was born into the matriline at the bottom of the group’s dominance hierarchy. As he approached his fourth birthday, things were not looking good. His mother didn’t want to have anything to do with him and avoided him all the time. His sisters also ignored him; they were too busy hanging out with their mother, aunts, and cousins and playing with the babies in the group. Billy had two older brothers, but both had left the group two years earlier; he had since seen them only once during a brief encounter with Group Omega.
Billy was approaching puberty, and with testosterone boiling in his veins and blurring his thinking, he couldn’t help constantly staring at the females in heat. He once made a disastrous advance at an attractive young female from the top-ranking matriline in his group. As Billy walked up to her and lip-smacked the way he had seen the adult males do it (lip-smacking to a female macaque in estrus is equivalent to foreplay in humans), the female screamed her head off, with the result that her female relatives, the alpha male in the group, and a couple of his buddies all chased Billy around the island for hours. To Billy, this was a sign that it was time to go: he had to leave the group and seek his fortunes somewhere else. And so he left.
After spending a couple of weeks on his own, he started following Group Omega, where he thought his older brothers now resided. His presence at the periphery of the group didn’t go unnoticed by the Omega monkeys. The alpha male and some of the other males threatened Billy and chased him away every time he came near a member of their group. Most of the adult females screamed at him, just as the females in his previous group had done. The situation didn’t seem much better here. But Billy was right about his brothers being in this group—on a few occasions they approached him and groomed him for a while, which made him feel better. Moreover, an attractive subadult female in Group Omega seemed to be intrigued by Billy, and a couple of times she raised her tail, flashing her bright red behind right in Billy’s face.
During all this, Billy behaved submissively to everyone in Group Omega, flashing “fear grins” left and right to any monkey within a one-mile radius. If someone approached him, he immediately withdrew and crouched or hid behind a bush. This went on for weeks until eventually the Omega monkeys tired of threatening Billy; they let him hang around while they were resting and feeding, and he traveled with them when the group moved around the island, though always hanging back.
Billy was afraid of everyone in Group Omega, including the babies, who sometimes investigated him under the vigilant gaze of their mothers. There was no question in every monkey’s mind that Billy was at the bottom of the hierarchy. He had been accepted into the group, but on the lowest rung of the dominance ladder. Things stayed that way for a whole year, until a new guy, looking just as intimidated and disoriented as Billy initially did, joined the group. By this point, Billy was no longer the lowest-ranking male. Over the next four years, two alpha males left the group or died and were replaced by the males that ranked just below them, while other middle- and low-ranking males disappeared from the group for mysterious reasons. (The reasons were mysterious to the monkeys, but we know that these monkeys were captured and sold to a research laboratory.) After six years in Group Omega, Billy’s situation had significantly improved. He mated every year and became the father of a few rambunctious little monkeys. He also made some friends in the group, and now, when the group traveled, Billy walked in the middle and no longer at the periphery. Thanks to the deaths or disappearances of some of the higher-ranking males and the immigration of new young and submissive males into the group every year, Billy gradually rose in rank, so that in his seventh year in the group, he found himself in an amazing position for someone who tried to avoid fights at all costs and was even afraid of thunder: Billy was in the second-highest-ranking spot. Believe it or not, he was now the beta male in the group.
Then something unexpected happened. A human researcher doing some experiments on the island captured the alpha male of Group Omega and kept him out for go
od. This was it, Billy’s chance to become the alpha male. But unfortunately for Billy, things didn’t go so smoothly. As he tried to act like an alpha male, walking around with his tail up and, for the first time in his life, threatening other females and males left and right, a pack of adult females from the dominant matriline ganged up on him and chased him around mercilessly for days. The male ranking just below Billy saw an opportunity for career advancement and joined the females in the attacks. For some reason, the females seemed to think that this guy would make a better alpha male than Billy. As a result, not only did Billy miss his chance of becoming an alpha male, he ended up being banished from Group Omega. After a year of walking around the island by himself, lonely and depressed, Billy developed pneumonia, and one day a researcher stumbled upon his dead body.
Aside from the unhappy ending, Billy’s story illustrates the typical way in which rhesus macaque males leave their natal group, join a new one at the bottom of its hierarchy, and gradually rise in rank. This process has also been observed in wild Japanese and long-tail macaques—macaque species closely related to rhesus macaques—and males like Billy have been called unobtrusive immigrants. These male monkeys accept a “seniority” system of advancement in rank in which their status slowly rises with time spent in the group and as the higher-ranking males leave or die. This arrangement has also been called a succession system or queuing system, to convey the notion that the males patiently wait in line for their turn to become high-ranking. If they stay in a group long enough and are lucky or skilled, they may manage to make it all the way to the top. Some, like Billy, never make it to alpha status owing to either bad luck or bad manners.
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