The Rival You Didn't Mean to Invent

There's a promotion coming...

Nothing's been announced. Nothing official. But everyone can see the shape of it: one role opening up, and a small handful of people who'd each be a reasonable choice. You're one of them. So are one or two others — people you like, people you have coffee with, people whose company you'd have said, a month ago, that you enjoyed.

Nobody has mentioned competing. You're all far too civilised for that. But over the last couple of weeks you've caught yourself doing something you're not proud of. You're a little less warm with them. A little slower to share. When one of them wanders over for a chat you keep it shorter than you used to. Nothing you'd ever admit to. Nothing anyone could point at. Just a few degrees cooler than you were before any of this was in the air.

You're not a bad person. You're just doing what scarcity does to us.

It was never really about the job

The strange thing is how little the job itself actually enters your head in these moments. You're not standing there weighing up the salary or the title. Something older and quicker has taken the wheel.

Because the promotion is only one thing, and it can only go to one person. What the mere prospect of it does — long before anyone's decided anything — is quieter than open rivalry: it goes after your ability to be easily, straightforwardly on the same side as people you like. That's the bit that gets taxed. Not your career. Your friendships. And the tax starts the moment the thing appears on the horizon, not the day it's handed out.

Once that's underway, it starts to change how you show up — usually without asking your permission first.

What it does to me

This is the part worth turning inward, because it's the easiest to miss in yourself.

Once some part of you has quietly filed a colleague under "person I'm up against," you start handling them a little differently. You loop them in slightly later. You share the useful thing, but maybe not the really useful thing. You help when they ask, but you stop going out of your way to. You save the good idea for the meeting where it'll have your name on it, rather than dropping it in the team channel where it belongs.

None of it feels like a decision. That's what makes it so easy to live with. It feels like nothing at all — just a slightly more careful, slightly more closed version of you. But put a few people in the running for the same thing, all quietly doing the same sums, and the whole group gets a fraction less generous — and nobody could tell you exactly when it started.

So, honestly: when you're in the running for something, how collaborative are you actually? Not how collaborative you'd describe yourself on a good day. How collaborative you really are — when the thing in your hand might help someone you're being weighed against.

What it does to us

Trust runs on a simple assumption: that the other person basically wants good things for you. When you take that as read, you share easily, you ask for help without it costing you anything, you say the half-formed thing without armour on.

The prospect of scarcity slips a small doubt into that. Do they want good things for me — or, just now, would they quietly not mind if I stumbled? And the moment you're wondering that about them, they're almost certainly wondering it about you. Your careful, cooler self isn't invisible. People feel the shorter chats. They feel the door ease a couple of inches closed. So they ease theirs closed too, without ever deciding to — and now several people who used to talk straight are all being a bit guarded with each other, at exactly the moment you'd each benefit most from an ally.

Nobody fell out. Nothing got said. The working relationships just quietly thinned. And thin relationships carry less: less honesty, less help, less of the stuff that makes the place bearable — including afterwards, when the decision has landed and you all still have to work together.

The bit that's actually ours

You can't make the scarcity go away. There's one role and several people who'd want it, and one of them is you. That part was never yours to fix, and pretending you don't want it wouldn't fool anyone, least of all yourself.

But the cooling is yours. The withholding is yours. And it turns out you can hold the whole situation a lot more honestly than the reflex would like you to.

The move is smaller than it sounds. It's being able to sit with two true things at once: I want this, and I might not get it — and — the people I'm up against are not my enemies. Both. The reflex insists you pick one, and it always reaches for the rivalry, because rivalry feels like it's doing something useful. Holding both is harder. It's also the only version where you're still on decent terms with them — and with yourself — whichever way the decision finally goes.

You don't have to want it any less. You just have to stop letting the wanting quietly rearrange how you treat people whose only crime is wanting the same thing you do.

Worth sitting with

So, with nobody watching:

Who have you gone a few degrees cooler on lately — and what have they actually done, other than be in the running too?

What do you notice yourself holding back, in the stretches where you're competing hardest?

And if one of the people you're up against sat down to write this exact paragraph about you — would they have anything to go on?

RESOURCES — a few things worth your time

• "Envy at Work" — Tanya Menon & Leigh Thompson (Harvard Business Review, 2010) The classic on the emotion nobody will own up to. A decade of research on how envy moves through organisations, why it's so carefully hidden, and how the hiding costs more than the feeling ever does. Pairs uncomfortably well with this issue.https://hbr.org/2010/04/envy-at-work

• Give and Take — Adam Grant The counterweight. Grant's argument is that generosity isn't naïve — that over time, the people who give tend to come out ahead, even in competitive places. Useful for anyone wondering whether refusing to go cold is just a losing strategy. It usually isn't. https://adamgrant.net/book/give-and-take/

• Status Anxiety — Alain de Botton A wander through the deeper machinery underneath all of this: why we measure ourselves against the people nearest us, and why a promotion two desks away stings more than a stranger's fortune ever could. Also a watchable documentary if the book feels like a commitment.

• "Facing Professional Envy" — HBR IdeaCast (2020) A short, honest conversation for the walk to work — what to do with the envy when you notice it, rather than pretending you're above it. https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/12/understanding-envy-part-2-facing-professional-envy