How to protect yourself from your weakness in the office

Knowing what you really want in life, who you want to be, or how you want others to perceive you are important things to consider. It might seem like a given that we know this. Who hasn’t daydreamed about what they want. The truth is, very few people have actually written them down on paper or safeguarded themselves by consciously evaluating their thought processes in regards to their wants. Even fewer have considered their wants to be a weakness that others can take advantage of.

Internal desires and needs dictate a lot of decisions and behaviors that people make and exhibit. People do what they want to do. They act according to their belief. They have convictions and values. Many people aren’t afraid to share with the world what they believe in. Politics, religions, even preferences for which movie deserves an award are shared with the world. They are openly displayed in front of friends and even strangers, both online and offline.

While this can be great for showing a genuine character, there are many cases where your actions, influenced from unconscious desires, will expose you to harm. For executives at the negotiating table, master manipulators can exploit hidden desires uncovered through careful analysis. Employees can be exploited by their managers. Managers themselves can be manipulated by their team or higher up.

Emotions are also exploited. Your emotions reveal a lot. By discovering what triggers emotions, manipulators can control the feelings of people at an instant. They know what makes someone happy and what makes someone angry. Both can be used to a great advantage.

In this article we look at how emotions and desires become weaknesses in the office. We consider employees, managers, and executives. We also share tips on how to avoid being taken advantage of in the office.

Examples of exploitation and manipulation

Children might not come to mind when you think of master manipulators. However, they can exploit the emotions of others quite easily. Parents, teachers, and strangers are taken for a ride all the time. They are a classic example of people who use emotion and exploit emotion to get what they want. Examples from children serve a great purpose for even CEOs of enterprise corporations. Many of them are also parents who get taken advantage of.

Let’s look at teachers. Inexperienced teachers have felt the manipulation caused by children. First time teachers who are thrown into a room of children is similar to someone being thrown into a lion’s den. Dozens of confused, curious eyes stare at their helpless victim. Or should we say a gatekeeper to what they really want. Playtime. Or food in the case of lions.

Without the confidence and knowledge of a well-experienced teacher, new teachers easily sweat under pressure. To the lion tamer this results in death. To the teacher, a very bad day. Children can see worry and anxiety on the face of a teacher who doesn’t have control of disobedient students. One child who ventures forward and challenges the teacher also invites others to do the same. Eventually chaos erupts and the teacher has to reclaim control before it’s too late.

Embarrassment, fear, stress, and more are shown as clear as day on their faces. Teachers begin to fear that they chosen the wrong profession or that they will be chewed out by their superiors or the parents. Thoughts race through their head as they struggle to regain control of the situation. When their authority is challenged by the mischievous children, they lose face and fall prey to weaker students. If careful steps aren’t taken by the teacher to improve their resolve, they become the stereotypical apathetic teachers of inner-city school systems that we read about all the time. They have given up.

Why does this happen? Is it because the teacher is weak? No. Is it because the children are strong? Of course not. But the children do have an advantage. They know exactly what the teacher wants and doesn’t want. Many times the teacher doesn’t even know what the children want, making it hard for them to control them. The children don’t want to study or do assignments and they look for opportunities. When they see teachers falter because of some action that they do, they learn and capitalize on it relentlessly until the teacher loses it.

Emotional exploitation happens all the time with children. With parents, children have the desire to get exactly what they want: toys, candy, or relinquishment of responsibilities. How can children get what they want from their parents?

Remember the last time you saw a child throw a tantrum in public. This kind of tantrum was one that got the attention of everyone around earshot. Now try to remember the face and emotions of the parent. They were angry, frustrated, embarrassed, and resigned. If you have experienced this from your child, you sure as well know what it’s like. Eventually, a parent will have to give in to the child’s desires to escape persecution from the public and looking like a fool. The parent wants the child to stop. In this very moment of protest from the child, they could care less about the child’s future. But it comes at a price to get what the parent’s want. They must forfeit and give into what the child wants.

Children know exactly how to push buttons to get what they want. They stir emotions and train their parents to react when they act. Funny enough, dogs can do the same. If you don’t believe this, watch an episode of The Dog Whisperer. Sometimes dogs are the ones who train humans into taking a command.

When we analyze the situation we must look at the victim to find a way to prevent this exploitation. This comes from analyzing what we have already mentioned before. What is it that the parent or teacher wants? For the parent, they want peace, quiet, and no unwanted attention. For the teacher, they want obedience, order, and discipline. One can say that what they truly want is to have a student or child that will have a great education or will pick up outstanding values that make them a good citizen. But these “wants” more long term and well thought out in the minds of the parents and teachers. The desire for peace or order and wants that haven’t been consciously thought of until chaos occurs.

The parent must understand their true wants. Every single one of them. Then the parent must decide which of these wants can be a vulnerability. For teachers, it goes the same.

Manipulation in the Office and Elsewhere

We’ve gone over some of the ways that children manipulate others. We now move to the office. This is the setting where managers are expected to be firm and resolute. They are expected to move teams towards an organization’s goals and are expected to be efficient and organized. Executives are expected of following an organization’s vision and set the strategy. And at the trenches of an organization are the employees who must complete tasks.

Internal and external wants and desires influence people all the time in the office.

We first look at the employee. This person is the basic unit of human capital a company can have. In some large corporations, there is a good chance that the employee hasn’t even met the leader of the company. In some smaller companies, leaders form close relationships with their staff.

An employee is influenced by a number of things. The amount of leverage that they possess when trying to get what they want in an office is minimal. This can make it very stressful for an employee. Let’s consider some of the things that the typical employee wants.

• Financial security
• Recognition
• Progress and growth
• Low stress
• Stability

These are the obvious things. Each of these wants can be exploited by management. For the contract worker, stability isn’t guaranteed. Contracts that are about to expire makes a contract worker very nervous and very willing to do whatever the manager wants. For financially challenged employee, withholding bonuses or raises makes it difficult for a struggling employee to deal with crisis or moving away from a paycheck-to-paycheck life.

Progress and growth through promotions and recognition, make an employee feel valuable and that they are getting somewhere. Promising promotions with stipulations make it quite easy to get an employee to give up something, such as weekends off, or vacation time even. The employee at the bottom rung of the ladder is in quite the spot to be controlled. Everyone knows it. Companies wield great influence over its employees.

For an employee to protect themselves from their employer taking advantage of the situation (even unknowingly), they must go to great lengths to prevent their wants from being too influential. Of course, it is hard to bargain when one’s livelihood is on the line. These wants are essentially needs. Unfortunately, that’s the situation that many employees face. They must work diligently to remove these needs from the clutches of their employers if they want to gain control. This is by no means something that everyone can do. But, some can. Some can invest their little savings into something that brings returns. Some can forego buying a big expensive car that they don’t need. Some can even focus on their skills and experience through volunteer training and education so that if they did get fired, they’d be able to find a new job easily. Also, growing one’s professional network does wonders when it comes to being able to find a new job.

The employee that takes steps to minimize their weaknesses faces a great chance of not being pushed around by their employer.

When it comes to manipulation there are more things to consider. Employees sometimes voluntarily will give into the desires of their manipulator without knowing it.

Some of the most cunning managers will analyze each employee for what they truly want. The need to be recognized, the need to be right, the need to be powerful, or the need to be wanted are some needs that employers will exploit.

Let’s consider the first need; the need to be recognized. When a manager wants to gain influence over an employee who as a strong desire for recognition, the manager will recognize an employee frequently. The manager will reward the employee for completing undesirable tasks with recognition in front of others. When the manager starts to ask for more than the employee is comfortable with, any hesitation is dealt with by appealing to the employee’s need to be recognized.

The manager encourages the employee by saying things such as, “you’re the best in our team. Let’s show them how it’s done.” Or, “when you’ve accomplished this, I’m going to introduce you to the CEO.” While it may seem like a great thing, the sly manager who knows where to hit is doing so out of manipulation.

Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the key books that managers use to get what they want from employees without them even knowing it.

Foiling the plots of managers when they fly under the radar takes careful analysis. The employee must go beyond the “what’s in it for me” approach and think “what’s in it for him or her.”

Exploiting lower management

In the middle of the organization is the team manager. They often get the ire of the employee when they get forced to do something. While they may be despised, they are subject to a different set of stressors than the regular employee. Lower management is subject to performance figures. They are expected to put in the hours and achieve results through brute force. There is a lot upper management can exploit to get lower management to do their bidding.

Managers have innate needs such as commanding authority over their team, reaching performance quotas, and stoking their ambitions, to name a few. These desires make them go to great lengths to achieve their goals. Upper management who want to push them in different directions use these desires to their advantage.

There are many cases of executives who “hint” at vacancies in upper management to those of lower management. A lot of these hints involve inexplicably gaining the favor and attention of the decision maker by doing what he or she wants them to do in order to be considered for the role. Putting in more hours or doing questionable things to attain results are things that lower management sometimes do to get what they want. While a manager knows that their potential benefactor is pulling their strings, they have little clue to how well they are being played. A watch of the movie Horrible Bosses will humorously show this example.

What makes it even easier for an executive to manipulate their lower management is their experience as a manager themselves. They know what they want and need. They know how to string along someone without them knowing it too.

Executive manipulation

Even the highest of ranks can be exploited. There is always a bigger fish in the sea. Some might think of the CEO as the highest person in the company who has all the power and is unstoppable. If this was the case, Steve Jobs wouldn’t have been fired from Apple.

Yes, even the CEO has someone above them that can pull strings. The Board of Directors, the shareholders, the insiders, government, the press, and other companies can exert great influence. Executives must always be on guard. The power that they have can make or break the company.

In the case for being played, they can cause great harm to the company. A lot of con artists and internet scammers realize this and do their best to gain influence by deception or other means. Many executives will dismiss this, but understand this: in the 21^st century, more and more people are being hacked, scammed, and deceived via the internet than ever imagined.

Every executive must be on guard because one false move from them can put a company in ruins. If you can’t imagine it, check this story out.

An executive must go above and beyond and become bulletproof. The reason is, there are more eyes on the executive than any other people in the organization. They wield power that others don’t have. One small move ripples across the entire organization and when they are manipulated, there are big effects.

The best defense for the executive involves staying vigilant, being self-aware, and knowing potential enemies and their associates. It is also created by keeping true desires hidden. This means controlling emotions in front of others, being selective with what is shared, and also knowing what signs might give away your feelings. Every executive owes it to their company to not be taken advantage of. When executives are taken advantage of, often the employees also pay a price for it.

For someone who wants to maximize their safety, they can take some of the following steps.

• Make a list of all wants and desires (consider what you don’t want as a desire)
• Identify which of these wants and desires have priority in your life
• Identify people who might have influence over these wants and desires
• Analyze how people currently communicate with you and write down times when others mention anything that involves any of your wants and desires
• Come up with strategies to deal with these people who may be trying to manipulate you

Above all, keep in mind that many times people manipulate others without even knowing it. Be very careful when you try to call someone out on trying to manipulate you. Sometimes it is even to your advantage to play the fool and let them believe that they are holding influence over you. The last thing for you to do is get angry about it. Accept that there many people out there that are trying to take advantage of you. In your lifetime, you will encounter all sorts of manipulators. The sooner you take command of your situation, the better off you will be so that you can focus on your goals and your organization’s goals.