Do you have a Self-Promoting Peer?
compitition conflict driving results leadership manufacturing manufacturing supervisor leadership results self-promotion supervisor
Workplace competition occurs an employee's primary objective is self-promotion with their ultimate goal being career advancement. For example when I was a manufacturing supervisor at a large snack food company, there was another supervisor who didn’t really care about the people, the plant or the results, instead they were just looking to be promoted.
Mike was his name and Mike would only do work that was visible to the managers. Mike ignored tasks that were important but not visible and Mike would never talk favorably about anyone else. When someone else did a nice job completing a task or project, Mike took the credit for it. Mike positioned himself to look like a shooting-star to the managers, but to his peers, he was an untrusted coworker. From my perspective, Mike was an okay person, but I never expected anything from him, and I never trusted him.
Adversarial peer relationships can occur in manufacturing when a peer’s primary objective is self-promotion and in these situations, you are their competition. If you are involved in a situation like this, you need to accept that this person is all about self-promotion and that you can’t change them and you can’t change the organizations perception of them. Your managers are either enamored with them or they see through them and you are not going know the truth about how they are really perceived. Unfortunately, you can’t go to your boss or HR about them because it will make you look jealous and petty.
So what can you do? Well the best thing you can do is to simply outperform them. Results always win in the long run. Your peer who self-promotes may very well get a leg-up in the short-term and maybe they will even get promoted before you do, but if you keep delivering solid results, your time will come. I’ve built my career not on politics and not on self-promotion, but by consistently delivering great results and you can too.
So if you have an adversarial relationship with a peer because they are political and self-promoting, just don’t play that game. Let their career run its course. It will catch up to them eventually. Companies need results and they can't afford to carry employees who don't deliver. So, you just focus on your professional development and delivering great results and you will have an incredibly successful career. Meanwhile that political, self-promoting peer is destine for failure.
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