Even if it wasn’t so much “manipulative”.
I have and will continue to make a small number of obvious omissions or minor misspellings in my work when I submit it to my bosses for review. Not in the majority of my work, but mostly when they may have some resistance or hesitation on a course of action or a part of the project.
If I can trick them into contributing to the project by fixing or improving it, they end up feeling ownership of it in a way they wouldn’t have otherwise. I do this on purpose, and turn a hesitater into a champion of the work. It’s our project now!
I ask leading questions that make people think an idea is theirs. Business people love their own ideas. A woman’s? Not so much.
Oddly enough I have done this in reverse to Jr members of my team. Amazing the engagement you get when they catch something they see as obvious, and thanking them brings up moral.
It’s a win-win for everyone. Plus, if the person misses the obvious thing, you know what not to trust them with in the future!
Not the most manipulative but
Keep a log of the birthdays, hobbies and names of spouses and children of colleagues, managers, team members and customers.
I learnt this from a guy who did executive search. People remember you, when you remember what is important to them.
When I’ve lead teams it’s one of the first things I find out - note down when someone says “yeah Gary that’s my hubby, he’s super into gaming”
- Gary (husband.)
- likes gaming
When you’re a manager, your teams families, partners and friends know your name. Reciprocating that - learning who is important to them - is really important.
To me this seems less like manipulation and more like you put in the effort to not only be a good boss, but a real person.
If you care you’re a good person. If you pretend to care in order to network then you’re being mildly manipulative.
Bingo. I think that’s the key to it - if you do it with the intent of getting something from someone, people will work that out pretty quickly and resent it. It comes over as being…greasy.
If it’s done from the perspective of having genuine interest, care and empathy it makes it easier to work as a group.
Has this ever backfired on you? While your motive is wholesome, I could see the practice itself seeming creepy. Like keeping notes of someone else’s life.
Yep. There’s people that want to keep distance at work and don’t appreciate it. Just have to respect that and leave them to it.
Yep. There’s people that want to keep distance at work and don’t appreciate it. Just have to respect that and leave them to it.
- Jane (wife.)
- likes the pool cleaner boy and has been sleeping with him behind her husband’s back for 8 months.
Some people just don’t like to have their hobbies shared.
When I was at a small company that worked with radioactive material, we had to register and secure all radiation sources, even the extremely weak ones that anyone can order online with no restrictions. Before the state inspector came, we deliberately left one of those weak sources out where it wasn’t supposed to be so that the inspector would find something wrong, tell us to fix it, and leave feeling like she did her job. It would be the smallest possible violation and it wouldn’t actually get us in trouble. We did that because we figured that if there was nothing obviously wrong, the inspector would look for problems a lot more carefully.
(Nuclear physicists are rather more nonchalant about radiation than the average person is, for obvious reasons. By nuclear physicist standards, we didn’t actually have any dangerous sources at all. Thus we felt like we weren’t doing anything morally wrong, but I suppose that the average person might have disagreed.)
meanwhile the last NRC audit at my workplace, the inspectors didn’t even use the hand and foot exit monitors on their way out. 🤦♀️
I actually worried for a bit that it was a test and they were looking for someone to stop them, but nothing was on the report. smh
Ages ago, I was part of a department that was subject to a compliance inspection. The inspection wasn’t a surprise, but it was short notice. We spent days making sure that our two networks of hundreds of computers each were compliant (they mostly were) and that our documentation was up to date (it mostly was). They spent their entire inspection looking at two internal DNS servers. (They passed and we were praised for our higher than average compliance.)
We had great health inspectors at my former food service management job. There was no way to conceal that we had mice. But the mice never touched the food. My district manager had made a room towards the back into a chill meeting room with couches from Habitat for Humanity. Those couches turned into their nests.
I went so far above and beyond to fix the mouse issue. I tore out a drop ceiling in one of our dry storage areas with no training and no protection. I was getting below minimum wage at the time because I was on the lowest possible exempt salary. I got showered in mouse shit and who knows what I breathed. I did this because the inspectors were cool and wanted to help us with the problem instead of shut us down.
They forced us to use glue traps through which I disagree with morally versus kill traps. I used oil to set many mice free. Most of them probably went back into the store.
I work in web dev and one of my jobs is to get you to engage more.
Maybe it’s buy more products.
Maybe it’s read more content.
Maybe it’s click on the button.
Maybe it’s like and subscribe.
Sometimes I do it with good UI. Sometimes I do it with dark patterns. Sometimes I do it by not allowing you to opt out.
I also get data to increase that number based on human behavior.
The worst part – im one of millions of people and companies who are doing this. We are all wanting your attention.
Maybe not the most manipulative, but it’s the first thing to come to mind…
When I was 21 years old, I was dating a delightful lush who was 19 and it was a bummer that we couldn’t go out drinking together. So, I found a marriage certificate online, put our names on it and printed it out, then copied it. We also went to a department store and spent $20 on a convincing cubic zirconia ring. We pretended to be married because my state’s antiquated laws consider wives to be property of husbands in this regard, so voilà! We could now go out drinking together! And boy did we, haha.
