The 5 things you should never
do at work are:
2. Backstab your colleagues
I’m astounded at how many people today feel completely comfortable
ridiculing, disparaging or undermining their colleagues, co-workers and even
their friends. I used to be that kind of person – talking behind someone’s back
if I felt they were behaving poorly, meanly, or less than professionally. I
learned later (in my therapy training) that this is called triangulation –
telling a third party about something that makes you anxious or upset instead
of dealing with it head on with the individual in question. Why do we do that?
Because we lack the courage and fortitude to address the problem directly, or
we feel it just won’t work out if we do. It relieves our anxiety to share the
problem, but it does nothing to resolve it.
Other folks may call this “gossip” (gossip, by the way, is
another “must not do” in the workplace). But backstabbing your colleagues is a
special brand of negative behavior because it aims to hurt. And when you desire
to hurt others, it will be you who suffers. In one job, I backstabbed a
colleague because it seemed that she received all the accolades, promotions and
perks because of her beauty and her obsequiousness to our bosses. All of that
might have been true, but trying to take her down behind her back didn’t work.
That behavior never will, in the long run. You’ll only embarrass and humiliate
yourself and it will come back around to bite you eventually.
