The Day You Got Eaten

Few of us seem to get formal training on how to have influence when we have no real authority.

I remember a colleague asking me about my approach to this, and I jokingly gave him the one rule I actually trust.

"Don't be the red bull."

He just looked at me, clearly waiting for the rest. I knew the line wouldn't mean anything unless he knew the story behind it, but I was just trying to make him lean in.

See, I'd argue most of us operate in environments where influence matters more than authority. You can't order anyone around, so everything you get done runs on trust, and on the people willing to back you when you're not in the room.

That requires a lot of different things to go right, but the fastest way I know to lose all of that isn't some big betrayal or a bad quarter. It's quieter than that.

That's a hard thing to explain in a sentence, so I did what I usually do and told him the story the rule comes from.

It's an old Arabic fable, and it goes something like this:

The obvious lesson is that division destroys a group. The sharper one is about the red bull himself.

He thought the dangerous moment was the end, when the lion finally turned to him. It wasn't.

It was the very first conversation. He thought he was negotiating his survival when he was only choosing the order in which things happened.

What he misread was what his safety was made of. Thinking it was his — his color, his standing, his private deal with the lion. It was the three of them covering each other, and the moment there were two, the thing keeping him alive was already gone.

Notice that he never does anything dramatic. He just listens and nods. That's the whole crime, a small, sensible yes.

Now, I know you're reading this story about bulls and thinking you would obviously never be that naive.

But I don't know a single seasoned expert who hasn't encountered someone trying to cause division at work, and it’s almost never blatant.

It often won't look like scheming at all.

It’ll look like a reasonable person, making a reasonable point, in a quiet side conversation, about a colleague who happens not to be in the room.

Which is exactly why we can't get trapped thinking it will never happen to me. That thought isn't the armor it feels like. It's more like the unlocked door.

All of us can use a reminder on how to protect against the lion.

The one to hold onto is simple: he's never really after a bull, he's after what the bulls have together.

So I look for three things.

Let’s get it…

The first is a favor that arrives in a whisper and just happens to be all about me.

The lion never asks the bulls for help. He offers them a deal. The white bull attracts hunters, eats our grass, and if he's gone, we all get peace. So when a case against a colleague shows up in private, built around what I supposedly get out of it, and aimed at someone who can't answer back, I've learned to stop treating it as a normal conversation.

It's a recruitment. And the complaint itself almost always sounds fair, so the fairness was never the thing to check. The thing to check is why I'm being told this quietly, off to the side.

The second is the moment someone hands me a fast "us" and charges me a "them."

The red bull's fatal yes came right on the heels of one sentence: your color is like mine, and the black bull is a stranger to us. That's the whole trick. A warm, quick sense of belonging, sold to me at the price of agreeing that somebody else doesn't belong. When belonging shows up that cheaply, and the cost of it is another person's standing, I slow all the way down, because the similarity is only the bait.

The third one matters more than the other two put together, and it isn't about spotting the lion at all.

It's about understanding what my influence is made of.

When I don't have authority, my influence was never my title or my seat. It's the people who trust me and speak up for me when I'm not in the room.

That web is the entire asset. So every colleague I let get isolated and picked off is more than someone else's bad day. It's a thread cut out of my own net, influence quietly subtracted from me while I'm nodding along thinking the conversation was about them.

Which is why I cover the people who aren't there to cover themselves, and why I pull the private conversation back into the open, usually as simple as saying, "let's bring them into this before we decide anything."

I don't do it to be noble. I do it because there will always be times when the web is the only power I've got, and I'm not going to help someone dismantle it one reasonable yes at a time.

It costs me sometimes. I read a moment wrong, or I speak up when the whole thing would have been fine without me. But you can't be afraid of failing a few times, because the alternative is the red bull's kind of caution, and that caution is the exact thing that got him eaten in the end.

You can't stop lions from existing. But how often it works is up to you, because a trick you can finally name loses most of its power over you.

The lion doesn’t need to beat the bulls with strength. He can beat them with their own agreement, one quiet whisper at a time.

The red bull got a say every single time. He used his to help.

So watch for the private favor that flatters you, and the "we" that turns out to be a fence built around someone else.

Spend more of your energy protecting the web of people who trust you than protecting your own chair, because when your authority runs out, that web is the only influence you have left.

I'll leave you with this question: The last time a name got quietly picked apart in a room that person wasn't in, which bull were you?

If you're up for sharing, just hit reply and tell me how it went. I read every response.

Thanks for reading. Be easy!