Chapter 4: Who To Trust At Work Part 12
In the last post, I shared stories of people who had negative experiences dealing with a Fox. While a Fox can talk you into anything, the great weakness of the Fox is execution. If you don’t do the job for him, he can’t get it done by herself. I asked Liz how she dealt with Susie, who was taking credit for her work.
“When someone gets a promotion before me, I don’t mind, no sour grapes. But when they lied and cheated and misrepresented themselves, I have more of an issue. You get to a point where it’s not benefiting me to get all riled up about it. At a certain level you will be found out. [If you choose to live that way], you will be the one looking over your shoulder waiting to see who would stab you.”
For the record, Susie was eventually demoted and later let go. Liz was promoted several times, and went on to run a group of more than fifty people.
Another Senior Marketing Manager shared the following with me, which led me to a strategy for dealing with a Fox. Sometimes “the guy who takes the hit is the guy trying to execute on unrealistic, jackass plans. Two to three rounds [of layoffs] later, it eventually it gets figured out and cleaned up. In the meantime there is a wake.”
So my takeaways from both stories:
1. It can be more stressful to be the fox than to deal with a fox, because a fox is always worried about being exposed or disempowered. So don’t worry too much about them “getting away with it.” You wouldn’t want to live that life.
2. A fox survives by manipulating others. Once you understand a fox, they lose their power over you, and you have a decent chance of outlasting them.
Often the person being manipulated by a Fox is a Wolf, which I will begin to illustrate in the next post with the parable of The Fox and The Wolf.
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