Let me ask you something. Have you ever walked away from a meeting or a conversation or an entire project and thought to yourself, what just happened? Everything looked fine on the surface. People were smiling, nodding.
The words being used were all the right ones. Teamwork, collaboration, alignment, synergy. And yet the project stalled. The credit disappeared.
Your confidence took a hit. Or maybe you just kept getting invited to the wrong rooms and excluded from the right ones. You are not imagining it, my friend. You are not too sensitive and you are absolutely not alone.
Today, we start naming it. Welcome to the Career Pivot Accelerator. I'm your host, Peggy McKnight. And today, we are kicking off a three-part series that I have been waiting to do for a long time.
A long, long time. And I finally have all the pieces of this puzzle. And I'm excited to share this episode with you. Here is what sparked it.
I attended a presentation recently and the person speaking started putting words and context to things I had been experiencing and witnessing in my own career and my own workplaces for years. And I sat there thinking, finally, someone is saying this out loud. Finally, someone is handing people the language for something they have been living without being able to fully name. And the moment you name something, truly name it, it stops having the same power over you.
That is what I want to do for you in this series and with every single episode. I thought to myself, my listeners need this. That's you. You, right there, wherever you are listening to this right now.
Whether you're on a commute, at the gym, doing the dishes, or sitting in your car in the car park because you needed five minutes before you walk back into the building. This one is for you. So, this three-part series is called Beware of the Person Who Defines Your Future Skills for You. Here is exactly what you are going to get across all three episodes.
A field guide. A roadmap. The field guide names what you are dealing with. The specific people, patterns, and behaviors that derail projects and cap potential.
And the psychology behind why they work. The roadmap. This shows you where we are going. From naming the problem, to understanding the conditions that created it, to becoming someone the conditions cannot touch.
Because what is the point of a field guide if you don't know where you are headed and how to get there? By the time we finish, you will never walk away from a derailing experience again without knowing exactly what to call it, why it happened, and what to do about it. This is the promise of this series, and it starts right now. Buckle up.
Let's go. To start with, I want to draw a distinction that most people never make. And once you hear it, you will not be able to unhear it. Teamwork and collaboration are not the same thing.
We use them interchangeably as though they are, but they're not. And the confusion between them is one of the reasons collaboration gets misused, overused, and ultimately devalued in so many organizations. So, teamwork. It's coordination.
It is the efficient division of labor towards a shared goal. Everyone has their lane. Everyone does their part. The result is the sum of the individual contributions.
Teamwork is incredibly valuable. Teamwork is necessary. But teamwork does not require people to genuinely think together. It requires them to execute together.
And those are very different things. Collaboration is something different. Collaboration is the process by which people with different knowledge, different perspectives, and different roles bring those differences into genuine contact. And then produce something that none of them could have produced alone.
The result is not the sum of the parts. It is something new, something fresh, something that only exists because those particular people were genuinely, openly, and safely in the room together. Teamwork says, here is your piece. Go do it.
Collaboration says, bring your whole mind to this because I cannot see what you can see. And we need both. That distinction matters enormously for everything we are about to discuss. Because the derailers that we are going to name today do not just disrupt teamwork.
They specifically destroy the conditions that make genuine collaboration possible. What excellent collaboration actually looks like. Here is the benchmark. Before we look at what breaks it, let me give you the benchmark.
I think that will be a great place to start for what excellent collaboration actually looks like. I think it's important that we carry a clear picture of what we are measuring against throughout this series. Excellent collaboration looks like information that flows freely rather than being rationed by whoever holds it. It looks like credit given specifically and publicly to the people who earned it.
It looks like the right people being in the right rooms. Not the most politically convenient people. Not the most established. But the people whose knowledge and perspective are genuinely essential to the outcome.
It looks like a culture where it is safe to say, I don't know. I was wrong. And I need your help. Without those admissions being filed away and used against you later.
It looks like new people being shown the best of what a team can be rather than absorbing the worst of what it has tolerated. It looks like someone finishing a project and being able to say honestly, we made something here that none of us could have made alone. And every single person in the room knowing that is true. That is the standard.
Hold on to it. Because everything we are about to name today is a deviation from it. So when should you actually collaborate? Great.
Here's a question. I want to put a pause into the whole discussion of today's episode and answer this question because it is worth asking. Not everything benefits from collaboration. And one of the ways organizations misuse it is by applying it to everything regardless of whether it's actually the right approach, which, as we will see, is exactly how you end up with a meeting on every day of the calendar throughout the year.
Collaboration works best when the problem is genuinely complex with no single right answer, when the solution requires knowledge from more than one domain, when the outcome affects multiple people who all need to understand and commit to it, when creative thinking is required, when you need the unexpected connection that only comes from different minds in genuine contact with each other. These are the moments collaboration earns its place. Collaboration is not the right tool when one person genuinely has all the knowledge and authority needed and simply needs to act, when a decision needs to be made quickly and clearly, when the work is execution rather than creation, when adding more voices will slow progress without meaningfully improving the outcome. And here is something that surprises people the most.
Collaboration is not solely for project work. Genuine collaboration happens in one-to-one conversations, in team problem solving, in mentoring relationships, in cross-functional work of all kinds. But it is equally not required for every piece of your daily working life. A skilled professional knows when to collaborate and when to simply get on with it.
The derailers, we are about to name corrupt both, either forcing collaboration where it is not needed or destroying the conditions where it genuinely is. Before we get into the derailers themselves, I want to set the stage with something that I think is going to completely reframe how you see this topic. If I asked you, what are the most celebrated skills in the workplace, what would you say? Well, most people land in the same place.
Leadership, communication, and, believe it or not, collaboration. Now, here is what is fascinating about this list. Leadership. There are entire industries built around it.
Books, courses, coaching practices, university degrees. We have defined it, studied it, argued about it, and refined it for decades. Communication, same story, public speaking courses, writing workshops, effective communication coaches. We take communication seriously as a skill worth studying, worth developing, worth measuring.
And then there is collaboration. You will find it named explicitly in many job descriptions. But even when the word itself doesn't appear, it almost always is there, coded in some form. Ability to work cross-functionally, strong interpersonal skills, team player, works effectively with stakeholders.
These are all collaboration wearing different clothes. Organizations put it on their value walls, celebrate it in town halls, and build it into performance reviews. Some treat it like a badge of honor, scheduling it, performing it, filling every day of the calendar with it, and calling the whole thing inclusive, without ever really fully understanding what collaboration means, or how it should actually operate well. But, here is the question that almost nobody is asking.
Has anyone actually defined what bad collaboration looks like? Has anyone sat down and said, Here are the specific behaviors, the specific patterns, the specific personality types, that walk into a collaborative environment and quietly, sometimes without even realizing it, burn it to the ground? Almost nobody. And that is precisely why we are here today.
Because you cannot protect yourself from something you cannot name. And you cannot fix something your organization refuses to examine. So today, we build the field guide. Before we really dive in, because there is a lot of information I really want to share with you, and sometimes it might feel a little heavy.
So, just to set the scene, I want to share with you, I've got three sections that I am going to be setting up for you in this episode. The first one is the derailer lineup. How to identify the power players, people, and why are they doing what they're doing, and why did that project or that collaboration not go according to plan? Then there is the derailer lineup, the process wreckers.
And we'll dive into that. And then finally, the derailer lineup of the culture corruptors, even. Can't even get my words in. So, the culture corruptors.
That one, we will end this episode on that note. So, let's get started. Okay, the power players. There are six of them.
Yes, believe it or not, there are six of them that I could name, and we're going to call out and shine a light on, so that you can get a greater understanding of what to look out for in future in your career. I want to introduce you to what I call the derailer lineup. Now, before I do, a quick but important note. These are not always villains.
Some of these people have no idea what they're doing. Like, seriously, they have no idea. Some of them genuinely believe they are helping. Some of them learned these behaviors from someone above them, or sideways, or even within their own school.
Yes, they've learned it at school and still carrying it through to adulthood, or within the family unit. But nobody's ever challenged them. The good intentions do not always cancel out damaging impact, though. So, we're going to look at this clearly and honestly, because that is the only way any of this gets better.
I've organized the derailers into three categories, and I want you to listen for the ones you recognize, from your current role, from your past, maybe, and I say this with love, from your own habits. Let's start with the power players. They are the derailers motivated by protecting their position, their expertise, or their credit. First up is the credit thief, which sounds like nothing, because they're too busy taking the bow.
You know the person. The project is 90% done, the hard work is behind you, and suddenly, they're there. Front and center, taking the credit, the people who actually carried the weight, somehow invisible by the time the applause starts. This derailer does not sabotage the project.
They just make sure they are the face of it when it succeeds. In psychology, we call the pattern behind this social undermining. Deliberate behavior, conscious or not, that interferes with another person's recognition and standing. Next up is the knowledge gatekeeper.
This sounds like, I'll handle that. Or sometimes, nothing at all, because they simply do not pass the information on. This is the person who sits on critical information, updates decisions, data, and does not circulate it. Not always because they are malicious, sometimes because information feels like power, and sharing it feels like losing something.
But the impact is the same regardless of the motive. Teams bottleneck, often without anyone realizing it. Decisions get made without the full picture, and the people who needed that information to do their jobs well are left playing catch-up, while this person quietly remains indispensable. And watch out for the sophisticated cousin of the knowledge gatekeeper, the person who reaches out for help without something they demonstrably already know, but are going to share that with you.
This is not confusion. This is competence audit disguised as collaboration. They are mapping what you know, how freely you share it, and whether you can be trusted with information, while giving you nothing in return and maintaining the appearance of collegial exchange. The tell, a few days later, the knowledge they claimed not to have turns out to be entirely present.
You were not helping a colleague. You were being assessed by one. The ceiling setter, also known as the doom prophet. Sounds like, learn what you can, but we won't really be touching that system.
Or the department down the hall will be the real experts on this, not us. This is one I want to spend the most time on today because it is the most subtle, the most damaging, and the most important for you to recognize the moment you hear it. This is the person who tells you with complete confidence and often with what sounds like genuine concern exactly how far you can go, exactly how skilled you can become, exactly what your professional future holds. And they deliver it like wisdom, like mentorship.
They are doing you a favor by being realistic or just saying. What they are actually doing has a name in behavioral psychology. It is called learned helplessness. This is the process by which repeated negative messaging causes people to stop trying, to stop reaching because they have been led to believe that effort is futile.
And when it works, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You believe the ceiling is real, so you never push against it. And the person who said it never has to compete with you. you.
Expertise is not a finite resource. When someone tells you there is not enough room for you to become highly skilled at something, ask yourself this. Who benefits from you believing that? Because here is what history tells us about every major system transition, every new technology rollout, every organizational change.
The people who thrived were the ones who refused to accept someone else's ceiling. They learned the new system and kept mastery of the old one. They showed up to the training even when someone implied it was not for them. They decided their skills were worth developing regardless of what anyone predicted.
If you take anything away from today's episode, let it be this. Do not let someone else write the story of your professional future. That is your story and only yours. Next up is the finger pointer and the cousin, the public critic.
The finger pointer sounds like that was Bobby's decision, not mine, or even worse in a group setting. I just want to be transparent about who was responsible for that outcome. Really? Ooh, watch out for those.
This derailer has one reflex when something goes wrong. Find someone else to hold accountable publicly and fast before anyone has a chance to look too closely at their own contribution to the situation. The psychological term for the thinking pattern underneath this is attribution bias. The deeply human tendency to attribute our own failures to circumstances and other people's failures to their character.
The finger pointer has turned this tendency into an art form. What makes this particularly damaging in the public nature of it? This is not a quiet conversation with a manager. This is the call out in the meeting.
The reply all email that names names. The comment in front of leadership that positions someone else as the problem before the person even knows there is a conversation happening. This is called scapegoating in psychology. Redirecting group blame onto one individual to relieve collective or personal pressure.
The damage to the targeted person's reputation can happen in seconds. Correcting it can take months if not maybe years. And right alongside the finger pointer sits their cousin, the public critic. This is the person who does not just deflect blame but actively criticizes others' work in group settings.
Not as constructive feedback as a way of making themselves look more capable by comparison. Watch the timing on this one. The public criticism almost always arrives immediately after someone else has been praised or recognized. That is not quality control.
That is social undermining in real time. Next up is the anger spewer. Sorry, I couldn't think of anything clever to say, so I'm just going to say it like I see it. Anger spewer and their close relative, the passive aggressor.
The anger spewer sounds like a heavy sigh in a meeting that nobody asked for. An email reply to two words when the situation called for 10, venting loudly about the process or the way things are handled around here with no names attached but somehow everyone in the room knows exactly who the target is. You may have been in this room. Maybe you are in it right now.
This is a colleague or the manager who carries their frustration like the weather. You can feel it before they even speak. The temperature changes when they walk in. You find yourself doing this low-level constant calculation before every interaction.
Are they okay? Is it safe to bring this up? Should I wait until tomorrow to send that message? That calculation has a name in behavioral psychology.
It's called displacement. And what it means is that the anger this person is carrying is rarely actually about what they appear to be angry about. It has been redirected from real source, which might be stress, insecurity, or a feeling of being out of control. On to something or someone more accessible.
Safer to aim at, less likely to push back. Now ask yourself, how many times have you been in meetings where this person blindsides you or you're left wondering, wait, what just happened? Why are they picking on me? It's because of their own insecurities.
They're looking for a target who won't speak up or push back. And sadly, it was you that day. And then there is the passive-aggressive version, which is in some ways harder to deal with because it comes with built-in deniability. Something is never quite direct enough to address.
The comments land just sideways enough that if you called it out, you would be the one who stands out as oversensitive. The pointed silence. The response that is technically, professionally, but carries a weight of hostility that everyone in the room can feel, but nobody can actually name. What makes this?
And the other one, the anger spewer so exhausting, is the emotional labor that generate in everyone around them. You are not just doing your job. You are constantly monitoring, adjusting, tiptoeing, walking on eggshells. In psychology, we call this emotional contagion.
And it is exactly what it sounds like. Mood spreads. When one person in a team is consistently operating from a place of barely contained frustration, that emotional state does not stay contained to them. It leaks into the room, into emails, into the meetings, into the way the whole team starts to communicate, not only with each other, but other areas.
And finally, we have the DARVO operator. I've saved the best for last because this is the most sophisticated derailer of them all. They sound like, I always seem to be the one who gets the blame around here, said with a sigh, said with complete conviction, said to anyone within earshot, but never with a name attached to the alleged blamer, and never with a specific example you could actually verify. You have probably been in a room when this happens, and you have probably felt that immediate involuntary reaction, that quiet internal alarm.
Am I the one doing this? Is it me they're talking about? Should I be worried? That reaction, that collective holding of breath, is not an accident.
It is their entire point. Psychologists call this preemptive blame shifting. And what it achieves is extraordinary by getting the victim narrative out first, before anyone or any actual event has occurred. This person controls the story because there is even, before there's even a story to tell.
Everyone around them becomes slightly cautious, slightly differential, slightly reluctant to challenge. And here is the really important thing to understand. You do not need a real threat to achieve that effect. You just need people to be uncertain whether the threat is real.
The ambiguity is the mechanism. And so a few days pass. You wait for the fallout. You're on tender hooks.
You watch for the signs of this mysterious person who is apparently always pointing the finger. Nothing ever arrives. No consequences. No evidence.
Just the original claim. Sitting there, doing its quiet work on everyone who heard it. Which raises the question you are probably already asking yourself. Was any of it real?
Here is what the research on this pattern tells us. Psychologist Dr. Jennifer Freid coined the term DARVO, which stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, and Offender. What Freid documented is a pattern where the person actually responsible for a harmful dynamic positions themselves as the victim.
The roles are reversed so convincingly that the people around them organize their behavior to protect someone who does not need protecting. While the person who does need some accountability receives none. Zero. Nada.
Zilch. Studies on blame sensitivity in the workplace have found that people who are most vocal about being unfairly blamed are statistically more likely to engage in blame casting behavior themselves. The sensitivity to blame is often a signal of how much they rely on it as a tool. And here is the tell.
Here is the moment that makes the whole picture snap into focus. Become almost always. Give it time. The same person who declared themselves as a perpetual victim of blame will turn around and publicly find fault with someone else.
Always. Right there. In the open. And you think, wait.
The person who's always being blamed is doing the blaming. The unnamed mysterious fault finder they described so convincingly. A reflection? Psychologists call this projection.
Attributing to shadowy unnamed others the exact behavior you yourself are engaged in. It is a remarkably effective piece of social engineering. And it works precisely because it exploits something decent in the people around them. The genuine desire not to be unfair, not to judge, not to dismiss someone's experience without evidence.
When you recognize this pattern, the most powerful thing you can do is this. Resist the urge to recognize your behavior around an unverified threat. Watch not their words, but their actions. Because the behavior always tells the real story long before the words do.
And occasionally, rarely, but memorably, this type of person will tell you exactly what they are doing. Not the specific moves, but the orientation. I have heard someone say with complete casualness that they have to play chess with the people at work. Seriously.
Like, work is not a game. It wasn't as a confession. It was a statement of fact. And they weren't being funny.
They were being serious. And I want you to hold on to that image. Because when someone tells you that workplace relationships are a game with winners and losers, they have just told you everything you need to know about how safe your ideas, your contribution, and your candor are in their hands. When someone tells you they play chess with their colleagues, believe them and decide accordingly what you put on the board.
That was a lot. Now let's move to the process wreckers. These derailers do not necessarily have a personal agenda, but they break the system just the same. For example, have you heard too many cooks in the kitchen?
Well, the over-collaborators who mean well, but whose need to have everyone involved in every decision slows everything to a crawl and waters down every good idea until it is unrecognizable from what it started as. Collaboration becomes a performance rather than a practice. Every voice included, every opinion solicited, and somehow nothing ever actually decided. This is where organizations confuse the appearance of inclusion with the reality of progress.
Then there's the moving goalpost. Leadership or stakeholders who keep changing the definition of success mid-project. The team hits the target only to discover the target has been moved. Again, this derailer often does not even realize they are doing it.
Because where they sit, they are simply being responsive to new information. But the team on the ground experience it as chaos, and the cumulative effect of motivation and trust is significant. Then there's the unnecessary approver. Someone who inserts themselves into every decision point with no real stake in the outcome.
Every approval takes three times as long. Every decision needs one more sign-off from someone who has nothing to do with the material to contribute to it. This derailer confuses involvement with relevance and makes the whole system move at their pace rather than the project's needs. The scope creep enabler.
The person who cannot resist. While we're at it, can we also add? Until the project is carrying so much additional weight, it can barely move forward. Each addition seems reasonable in isolation.
Together, they become a quiet project killer that nobody can point to as a single moment of failure because it happened incrementally. One reasonable sounding request at a time. And then there's the helicopter collaborator. Also documented in management research as seagull management.
They hover over at a distance. Swoop in the moment they sense something significant is happening. Insert themselves. Create turbulence.
And then disappear again, leaving the team to sort out the disruption in their wake. The team never quite knows when they are going to appear or what they're going to end up with when they do. It makes planning difficult and genuine team trust nearly impossible to build. Each one of these, on their own, slows a project down.
Combined, they can kill it entirely. And the particularly frustrating thing about process wreckers is almost all of them believe they are helping. And finally, the culture corruptors. I save these for last because they are the most dangerous category of all, believe it or not.
Not because they are the loudest, but because they are often the quietest. The change resistor in disguise. This derailer publicly says all the right things, nods in every meeting, tells leadership they are on board with new direction, and then privately plants seeds of doubt, drags their feet just enough, does not adopt the new process, influences the people around them without ever saying anything that could be directly challenged or addressed. The resistance is never quite loud enough to confront, but it is always present enough to slow everything down.
And because it is disguised as compliance, it is extraordinarily difficult to call out without looking at the unreasonable one. Then there's the legacy defender. Sounds like, we've always done it this way, or we tried something similar before and it didn't work. This person treats every new initiative as a personal attack on the way things have always been done.
Their resistance is not just about the process. It's about identity, their expertise, their history, their entire professional self-concept is tied to the old system. Change does not threaten the workflow. It threatens them, and that makes them far more invested in its failure than they would ever admit out loud, and even to themselves.
Then there's the excluded stakeholder. Not a person who excludes, but the condition of exclusion itself. And I include this here because exclusion is one of the most under-acknowledged ways that organizations sabotage their own projects. When the wrong people are at the table, or when the right people are consistently and maybe deliberately left out, a project loses the critical perspective of the very people who have lived with the outcome.
The people most often excluded are frequently the ones whose buy-in matters most. The people closest to the actual work, the ones who could have flagged the problem earlier, the ones who were supposed to be champions of the very change they were never consulted about. Exclusion is not always intentional, but it is always costly. And finally, the contagion sounds like a colleague who joined six months ago and has somehow already started to sound and act exactly like the most difficult person on the team.
This is the one that does not get talked about nearly enough, and it is the one of the most important dynamics to understand in any team environment. Here's what happens. The anger spewer, the DARVO operator, the finger pointer, they have been in the organization long enough to have established an unofficial standard of how things are done around here. And when new people arrive, they're like fresh blood.
They do exactly what social learning theory predicts. They look to the people around them to understand what normal looks like in this environment, how frustration gets expressed, how credit gets assigned, how blame gets handled. And if the loudest, most confident, most establishable voices in their world are the derailers, then they start to absorb those patterns, not because they are bad people, not because they would have chosen those behaviors in a different environment, but because they have not been shown another way. The water they are swimming in was set by someone else entirely.
Psychologists call this normalization, the process by which damaging behavior becomes accepted as simply how things are done around here. And once a behavior is normalized, challenging it starts to feel like the unusual thing. This is why culture is not a poster on the wall. Culture is what you model, what you tolerate, and what you reward every single day.
When toxic behavior goes unchallenged long enough, it does not stay contained to one person. It spreads. And new people arrive and look to the room for guidance, and the room teaches them the wrong things. The most important question you can ask about your team culture is not who is being difficult.
It is what behavior has been allowed to become normal, and who has learned from watching it. So here is where we land today. Collaboration is the most celebrated skill in the workplace and the least examined. We put it in our walls.
We put it on our values, in our job descriptions, but we have never built a field guide. We have never sat down and said, here is what it looks like when it goes wrong. Here are the names for it, and here is why it matters that you can see it clearly until now. The power players, the process wreckers, the culture corruptors, you have names for all of them now, and the names matter because you cannot protect yourself from something you cannot identify.
You cannot address what you cannot articulate, and you cannot change what nobody is willing to examine. But here is where I want to leave you today, and I mean this sincerely. Most of the derailers we talked about today did not build themselves into a vacuum. Someone taught them this.
Something rewarded it. Some environment made it not just possible, but actually comfortable and unchallenged and, dare I say, normal. And that is what we are digging into in the next episode, because next time we talk about the organization itself, the systems, the structures, the cultures that do not just allow these behaviors, they build the perfect stage for them. Some of what I share next episode might make you a little uncomfortable, not because it's harsh, but because you are going to recognize your own organization in it.
And that is exactly where the real conversation begins. I will see you then. If today's episode gave you language for something you have been living, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. I would love to know which derailer you recognize most, or have experienced most.
Come find me on Instagram at Mrs. Peggy McKnight, and tell me. I want to have a conversation with you. Those conversations mean everything.
Until next time, my friend, protect your potential. Nobody gets to define that but you.