Office Politics and invisible competition

I would assume that everyone, some point in their life, was accused of doing something that they never did. But have you ever been involved in a competition without knowing it? I have.

When I first started doing leadership/management work years ago, I had a colleague - Joseph. There were 6 people (including myself) reporting to my manager, and each of us manage a small team of people, about 20 people. Both Joseph and myself were new to this whole leadership/management role, but I had the advantage of doing minor project coordination and project management from previous opportunities.

I can't say for sure I was doing any better than Joseph, but my year-end review suggest that I was a bit better than Joseph. How did I know this? Well, the man came to me and told me "I got Meet Expectation, what did you get?" I didn't tell him, but I got "Exceed Expectation"

Anyways the poor dude eventually find out that the other five of us all got a better rating. He wasn't very happy at first. We all know what happened. But here is where the nightmare starts.

Our manager LOVEs to delegate his task to us. He is only good at drinking beer and munching on those KFC. But since this incident, he doesn't need to delegate anything to Joseph anymore. The dude would volunteer to absolutely anything that the manager brings up. There were tasks that was assigned to me, Joseph would tell the manager that "Godwine is busy as is, I can take on that for him" Eventually, its to a point where i have to defend myself and say "I am not that busy, I can manage it." There are tasks that we are suppose to work on together, but he refuse to even let me take part in it.

The competition is not just against me, it was against other people as well. The six lead used to be really close to each other, we would join for lunch and coffee together, but since the review, Joseph start to isolate himself from us. He tends to take any opportunity to put down others. He once told Wendy that "Your work is nothing, you don't have much to do"

Why, oh WHY am I surrounded by people who only like to act intelligent? Its really strange how some people want to feel important and better than everyone else. See, there is one cool thing about the human race - we could never accept the fact that everyone have different skill sets, or someone is just better in some specific area.

This have somewhat led to the discussion of "right" and "wrong". If you think about it, who set the rules to what is right and what is wrong? HUMAN.. yes.. WE... and how did we do that? Its almost a case of majority rules. Ok, the law aside, which is (you'd like to think) well analyzed and planned out. But in general. People tend to judge what is acceptable and unacceptable in society, this judgement is based on what is the general view of the public. You are consider wrong because you are doing things out of the norm or out of what the society think is acceptable.... ok, so this should clarify the concept of "Perspective" and "Point of view"

Back to our topic of Mr "I am the best" Joseph. You see, if someone is really far superior and better than everyone else, their behavior, action, mentality should also be more superior than everyone else right? Hence different. But wouldn't this make them deviate from the rest of the population and make you an outcast?

The one thing that we LOVE about Joseph is his ability to act. I am telling you, if anyone is to get nominated for the Oscar for office behavior, it will have to be him. Words like "I love my job" and "I love this company" is pretty much the forever famous Joseph quote, BUT at the same time, every now and then, he will bring up the topic of job search and its easy for him to find a job, and he don't planned on staying for a long time, and the fact that he has a million degrees under his sleeve (ok, I am exaggerating, he has 2.... ).. blah blah blah.. the list go on and on.

At the end of the day, we are responsible for our own action and the choices we make, this include the responsibilities to handle enemies we built for ourselves. Good luck Joseph, I am just going to play the modest nice guy role. I have a lot of friends, but I do want more.. you never know when others will be ahead of you, and what they can do to you.....