The corporate world is dog-eat-dog: to reach the top, you must assert your dominance — and subvert your colleagues’ efforts to dominate you.

Fortunately for you, I’ve put together this handy manual of corporate power plays — some old (with new nuances in the remote-first workplace) and some new.

“Let’s take a step back”

When you tell people to take a step back, what you are suggesting is that they are all missing the forest for the trees. Luckily, you have the strategic vision and the commercial nous to see the big picture and guide your organization through the dark woods. By asking that everyone stop doing work to ponder your exposition on product-market fit, user touchpoints, or (if you’re older) Porter’s Five Forces, you are cementing your position as the company’s de facto thought-leader.

• Things to watch out for: in general, there aren’t many pitfalls with this one, as long as you do not use it when actual work needs to happen immediately. This is rarely the case in most workplaces, but avoid using this tactic if you work in a hospital.
• Common variants: ‘time-out’, ‘take it back to first principles’, or (a more aggressive version) ‘we are going off on a tangent, let me bring us back to…’
• How to counter: what do you do if someone beats you to using this phrase? Avoid this happening in the first place: make a habit of opening every meeting with “let’s all take a step back.” If this scenario materializes, respond with, “thank you for this, very helpful. Can I suggest that we take an even broader view, and consider x/y/z?”

Meeting-crashing

Nothing screams ‘I’m powerful’ more than crashing a meeting to which you are not invited. The trick to pulling this off is to not even acknowledge you’re not on the invite — act as though you were expected to join. Before 2020, this meant observing colleagues and physically following them into a room when you saw them walk in; these days, you need to stalk your colleagues’ calendars and crash their Zoom or Google Meet. Bonus points if you not only crash the meeting but either chair it or summarise it at the end.

• Things to watch out for: be careful whose meeting you crash. They must be senior enough that your presence is taken as a sign you are important but not so senior that they can kick you out without embarrassment.
• Common variants: Slack channel stalking, commenting on shared Google docs.
• How to counter: if someone crashes your physical meeting, repel them with ‘oh sorry, this meeting is on x; our meeting with you is next week’. If you do have a meeting scheduled next week, cancel it with a note saying ‘actually we resolved everything without you :)’. If you don’t, do not bother scheduling one. If someone crashes your Google Meet, hover over their image and remove them. If they rejoin, ask them whether they are having connection issues and remove them again.

Speaking of meetings…

Show up to your meetings sans laptop

This power move is a combination of the previous two. Turning up to a meeting holding your laptop suggests you’re a grunt, a worker bee, a number-cruncher: someone at the bottom of the pecking order. If you’re truly important, the value you add comes from your insightful suggestions and your ‘take a step back’s, and these do not require software.

(A former boss told me that the higher up you climb on the corporate ladder, the fewer programs you need to have installed on your computer; if you’re at the very top, you don’t need a computer at all.)

So walk into meetings confidently, holding nothing in your hands (or, at worst, a notebook and pen).

• Things to watch out for: people asking you for information you haven’t memorized. Use the classic ‘let’s take this offline’ if this happens.
• Common variants: n/a
• How to counter: n/a

“I need you to do something for me”

You’ve just joined a company, and you want people to like you. So you start going above and beyond, doing things to help people, right? WRONG. Ask people to do things for you instead; in fact, draw attention to the fact you are asking them to do things for you.

This is an obvious power play, but there is a subtle psychological angle most people miss: people do not like feeling indebted. So, far from making them like you, constantly doing things for your coworkers may cause them to subconsciously resent you.

Conversely, when you get them to do things for you, they get to feel you owe them — even if you never plan to repay your debt. They don’t know that.

• Things to watch out for: don’t ask for difficult or time-consuming things, nor things that are perceived as degrading or outside their remit (e.g., making you coffee, booking meetings etc.)The point isn’t that you need them to provide a service; you just need to get them conditioned to the idea they do what you say while making them feel useful. Do not do it in a roundabout manner — people will resent it if they feel you’re trying to trick them into doing work for you.
• Common variants: n/a
• How to counter: if someone asks you to do something for them, agree to do it, then ignore the request. When they chase to ask why you haven’t done it yet, say that the CEO asked you to do something for them, and you had to drop everything else. In fact, can they help you get this done for the CEO?

LinkedIn Headline

This power play is most common in the start-up scene. You’re not a product manager: you are ‘helping build’. You’re not an executive: you’re a ‘thinker’. You’re not an engineer: you’re a ‘tinkerer’. But take notice: you can only use this power play if you are already perching at the higher rungs of the corporate ladder — where the alternative to ‘I’m helping build’ is ‘product director’ and above, not ‘intern’.

When you call yourself a thinker, you’re signaling a disdain for titles (sure, you are, in reality, a VP; but such things matter not to you), and a healthy distance from corporate types: yes, you do work for a company. But you don’t, like, work in the way that most people work: you’re not in the rat race, you’re not in the Office. You think. You have deep thoughts on important issues — not like the suits who go around calling themselves “executives”.

While on the face of it, this is a new addition to the power playbook, the psychology underlying it is timeless: it’s an expression of power through ostensible humility — because only the truly powerful can afford to do without the trappings of status.

• Things to watch out for: You cannot use this if you do not actually have an impressive title at work. Otherwise, it’s too transparent. Also, avoid overly ridiculous titles — no ‘ninja’, ‘warrior’, ‘sensei’, etc.
• Common variants: n/a
• How to counter: n/a

Schools

Bringing up your alma mater is classic signaling, but these days it requires finesse to pull off. You can’t just say you went to Harvard.

Instead, follow this approach: first, find colleagues who attended your school. Find the one among them who still brings up their education at every opportunity. Signal to them that you attended the same school, through some oblique reference that will mostly be lost on outsiders (e.g., if you went to Cambridge, bring up the Union, or May balls). Then just wait for them to loudly reference you in connection with their alma mater — and look reasonably embarrassed at the crassness of it all when they do.

If you didn’t attend a top uni, obfuscate. I met someone who attended Yale SOM; Yale is pretty impressive to most people, but if you work somewhere where most people went to HBS, Yale SOM loses its luster. So, he used to say that he attended an ‘East Coast business school’; this way, he confounded HBS grads (who’d never know that he didn’t attend HBS or at least Wharton) and the plebs who’d think he was being humble.

• Things to watch out for: don’t be obvious about it. Above all else, do not put a school on your LinkedIn title unless you have an actual degree from it. There is no worse anti-power play than putting ‘Harvard Business School’ on your title when all you’ve done is attend a 2-week online course.
• Common variants: name-dropping, place-name-dropping, golf course-dropping
• How to counter: there are two scenarios here: a) if the person in question has attended Oxbridge or a top ivy, say ‘oh you did their module on Coursera?’ This will force them to explain that they actually went to the school, which will crumble their ‘I am humble’ facade. b) for any other uni, pretend you do not know the school in question. You’ll get particularly hilarious results if you apply this to LSE (confuse it with UCL!) or the French Grand Ecoles.

Clothes maketh man

Tech founders power-played investors by turning up for meetings in t-shirts and hoodies. But they did it so successfully that they undermined the very tactic: casual dress is so acceptable in most industries that turning up in jeans does not signal a disregard for the convention (a classic marker of power and status). On the contrary, it signals conformity and hence a lack of power and status.

So, flip this on its head: if you work for a tech company, turn up in a suit and tie (no, this is not aimed solely at men). When people ask why you wore a tie, answer ‘because I came here to work’ in your most deadpan matter. An added benefit to this power play is that people will assume you’re suited up because you’re interviewing elsewhere — this perceived increase in demand for your services can only ever be a good thing.

• Things to watch out for: tying a bad knot (James Bond claims that a windsor is the mark of a cad, but do you really want to take advice from a racist, misogynistic dinosaur?)
• Common variants: methods of transportation (I was once at an offsite where several directors arrived in Porsches; the division president came on his eight-year-old son’s scooter).
• How to counter: if someone suits up before you have a chance to do so, draw attention to the power-play (‘is this your power-tie?’). All power plays are only successful as long as they go unmentioned — the moment you point out someone is trying to pull one, you’ve succeeded in subverting it.