Dealing with Jealous Colleagues (Revised)

Great spirits have always faced violent opposition from mediocre minds—Albert Einstein

If you are successful at work, you have to pay a price for that advantage! Mediocre co-workers, often jealous of that success, will show their insidious opposition in ways that are both overt and covert. To show overt opposition takes guts, energy, and a plan. Most mediocre people lack any or all these characteristics, so they resort to covert activities and to playing coy games that can sabotage you and your possible success. These activities include getting you into trouble by misleading you, planting incriminating evidence that can get you in trouble, stealing your work, sabotaging your experiments, and spreading vicious rumors about you, just to name a few. It takes little thought or courage to plot behind someone’s back and to denigrate them in ways that is “untraceable.”

Despite their mediocrity and cunning mean colleges leave a footprint of their jealous acts that is unmistakable. Subconsciously they want you to know who is causing you harm. Otherwise their needs are not met. Merely making you look bad is not good enough for their petty mind, but they have to do it in such underhanded ways that defies civility and decency. In the process they often betray their own insecurities and identities.

So, how do you deal with this pernicious and baneful weasel? Jealous colleagues create a toxic environment at work. Their ploy is to elevate themselves by bringing you down.

When this happens you have two options: ignoring them or dealing with them head-on. Ignoring jealous acts of baneful colleagues merely abets their committing more acts of jealousy. No matter how much you elevate yourself above their pettiness, on a bad day you are bound to recoil and react, even explode. But, that is exactly what they are looking for. So, by falling into this trap you have demeaned yourself to their level and you have become them in that moment. Yuck!

Confronting jealous colleagues takes a strategy, patience, and impregnable evidence of their deceit and duplicity. If they have kept at it for a while you are in good shape. Normally, jealous colleagues keep at it until they see a reaction from you in ways that satisfies them. They love to gloat in the pleasure of seeing you suffer in something for which they were responsible. This is so common that there is even a word for it: schadenfreude. In so doing, however, they provide you the trail of their actions and their fingerprints for you to make your case.

If you are really successful at work, jealous colleagues often go out of the way to round up others who can band against you and join their “club.” They often bring some complaint about your behavior and use other “club” members to fortify their view of how they see things. They will even proffer gratuitous and invidious comments, attributing them to others. They know that relaying an insult is worse than being insulted directly, but they delight in that reaction. In fact, a better measure of one’s success at work is often the number of colleagues you have in that “club.” If you look at it dispassionately, it is actually your fan club with a perverse mission!

Often, too, is that those who band against you will try their insidious charm to harm you. When a particular act goes too far and pierces their conscience, those who perpetrate such acts quickly regroup by offering you gifts, or taking you out to lunch, or making some kind of a peace offering. Their strategy is to keep you confused about their loyalties and to ingratiate themselves to you. They often succeed at this because achievers are straight shooters; they are not good at playing complicated games, just to get along with others.

The following guidelines are provided to deal with jealous colleagues. Remember, that by virtue of your superiority you have an upper hand in this dynamic. Do not stoop to their level and compromise your advantage. Just follow this prescription and you will come out on top:

1. If you see ongoing acts of sabotage, rumor mongering, and betrayal, the best response is confrontation. Make a note of all the “evidence” you have and ask for a face-to-face meeting with the person you wish to confront. Open the meeting by first telling them why you organized this meeting. Then lay down the evidence, one element at a time, and see their reaction. Here you must have incontrovertible evidence otherwise your case will fall apart and you will have to leave the meeting crestfallen. You cannot let this happen. This is why patience and good material evidence are critical to this meeting.
2. Once you lay down all your evidence ask the person if your observations are accurate. They may quibble over the details and stickle over your choice of certain words to show you that you are out of your mind. But, stick to the basic facts and do not exaggerate or embellish. Watch their body language. If you see them writhing in pain (because of their guilt) confront them with what you see and ask them why they are sweating over an interchange between two colleagues.
3. They may not admit to all their shenanigans but will accept blame for some of what you have experienced. They may even accuse you of how sensitive you are and that all their games were meant as acts in jest. They may even admonish you to grow up and to have a sense of humor about such things! You can quiet their concerns about your welfare by stating that the sense of humor you tolerate is from someone your respect and that it is no longer the case here. This usually drives home the point that you are making about your relationship with them.
4. When you get to this point it usually means that they do not want to own up to all their actions but are willing to acknowledge or even concede to their “inadvertent” participation in acts that are reprehensible. At this point you must ask them to cease and desist. At this point you can put them on notice by saying that if this did not stop immediately that you plan to take formal action to stop this. This may include reporting the incidents to your boss and HR.
5. If they have gone to your boss and spread nasty rumors about you to demean you or your work. Get the details from your boss and request that you would like to have a three-way meeting to sort this out. In this situation your boss my feel caught in an uncomfortable predicament, but by being firm and businesslike, you can get them to divulge enough about the squealing that you can get out what you are looking for. You take control of this step and organize such a meeting. If appropriate bring HR representative to this meeting.
6. Suggest to your boss that in the future if someone came to them with a similar complaint about anyone else that it would behoove your boss to have all parties present when discussing such perceived transgressions.
7. After the meeting write a factual memo to your boss about the meeting and send a copy to the jealous colleague and the HR representative who attended the meeting.
8. Although it is easier said than done, maintain an air of professionalism, even a soupcon of insouciance, if you can marshal it, when interacting with jealous colleagues. Maintain your own dignity in the way you deal with them. Treat them as if there is nothing wrong as far as the rest of the team members are concerned. They know what is going on and will have even greater respect for you because how you are able to maintain your aplomb, composure, and professionalism.
9. If you see the jealous colleague doing something good on their own, acknowledge their accomplishment by sending them a congratulatory note or a memo with a copy to your boss. This will bring them back to the reality that you are abundantly human and that they should treat you in kind and with respect from here on out.

Jealous colleagues are a reality that goes back to the origins of the human race itself. It is a reality stemming from the primordial human condition and that it is virtually impossible to avoid it. Do not delude yourself by thinking that if a situation with a jealous colleague becomes unbearable at one place of work that you would want to find another to give yourself a fresh start. No, instead redeem yourself where you are and learn a life skill.

Good luck!