Niccolò Machiavelli had an important piece of advice about office politics: “If an injury has to be done to a man,” he writes in The Prince, “it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.” Most of us can relate to that.
It’s likely that whoever accidentally insulted Nicholas Walker, the take-no-prisoners manager of the Rickmansworth branch of Robsons Estate Agents, by giving him a second-rate desk, hadn’t read Machiavelli’s 1532 tract. Because Walker, no doubt thinking of Machiavelli’s subsequent invocation – “it is safer to be feared than loved because … fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails” – immediately dragged his ashen-faced employers to an employment tribunal where he successfully sued them for unfair constructive dismissal. They probably really regret giving him that desk.
Actually, to be fair to Walker, there was more to this case – the placing of the desk was not where managers usually sit, which was, the judge agreed, tantamount to being told he’d be an assistant branch manager; a demotion, having previously been a branch manager. He was also not informed he would be sharing a managerial role.
Office politics – which in the Zoom epoch pursues you into your own shower – has become a ubiquitous live version of 1984’s Two Minutes Hate: a brutal social event that thrills the spectators and can’t be avoided by the subject. And it’s all about one thing: status.
What seemingly got Walker’s goat wasn’t an explicit demotion. It was in large part the drop in his perceived rank among his peers. He had been understood to have been kicked down the pecking order.
And yet: “Since the arrival of settled agriculture and private property around 10,000 BC, status has been a thing, whether that be the size of your pyramid or displaying a Gail’s coffee rather than a Starbucks coming into work. It can be the same for which seat you are allocated in the office,” the psychologist Oliver James, author of Office Politics, tells me, musing on the affair.
Why? Well, because the office is a crucible of society, allowing us to move up, down or across the social ladder in a way only backstabbing medieval princes have known before. And that fulfils a need in many of us: to be better off than him or her or, most of all, them.
As a result, the modern workplace tends to promote those who exhibit “dark triad” traits: psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism. James describes it thus: “Triadic behaviour flourishes where ruthless, devious selfishness is advantageous and where an individual is very concerned to gain power, resources or status.”
And to Walker, the case was about more than a desk and we certainly aren’t ascribing to him the dark arts of Machiavelli or those qualities James refers to. But status is important – it is about who is up and who is down. For, as Stephen Potter says in his 1952 treatise One-Upmanship: “If you’re not one-up, you’re one-down.”
It is, in one sense, a good thing that most of us obsess over our place at work: we do so because in the wider world few people care about who your family are, or what school you attended. The old definers of rank, which are not the result of ability or graft, have been swept away. At least your workplace status bears some relation to what you contribute and achieve. Nicholas Walker understood this well. It’s just a tragedy for the management of the Rickmansworth division of Robsons Estate Agents that they did not.
Holmes and Moriarty, the new authorised Sherlock Holmes novel by Gareth Rubin, is out now
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