Workplace standing compared: earned, spent, or quietly wasted

Five composites below. None describes a real person or company. Each is built around one source of standing, so that the source is visible rather than mixed in with everything else somebody happened to be good at.

Read them for where the standing came from and what happened to it, because the second half is where the useful part is. Acquiring it is slow and fairly well understood. Losing it takes a fortnight and is mostly invisible from the inside.

What to take away

Case 1: the person who wrote the document

Where it came from. Tired of explaining the same process, they wrote a page. Other people started sending it to newcomers. Two years later it is what everybody opens, and its author has shaped a hundred decisions they were never consulted about.

What it produced. Requests addressed to them by name, from teams they have never worked with. The document became a route into the organization.

How it nearly went wrong. They started treating edits to the document as challenges to themselves. Ownership of an artifact that everybody uses converts easily into a small fiefdom, and the moment other people stop editing it, it starts going stale and the standing goes with it.

Case 2: the person in the intake

Where it came from. They volunteered for a job nobody wanted: reading the incoming requests and routing them. It was interrupt-heavy and low status.

What it produced. They saw everything before anyone else. Within six months they could say what was coming, which teams were overloaded, and which requests were the same request in different words. Their manager began asking before planning rather than after.

How it was spent. On stopping a project that was about to be started on the basis of demand that did not exist. One conversation, one piece of evidence nobody else had, and it took four months of the queue to acquire.

Case 3: the person who was right in writing

Where it came from. A habit of writing down narrow predictions with dates: this supplier will miss the second milestone, this integration will take twice the estimate. Some were wrong and they said so plainly.

What it produced. After about five of these, their view started being sought before decisions rather than after, which is the whole difference. University teaching on people and organizations spends much of its time on this gap between the formal structure and the informal one, and this is the cheapest documented route across it.

What it cost. One of the predictions was right about a decision a senior person had championed, and it was right in a visible way. Being correct in public about somebody else's mistake is expensive even when nobody says so, which is an argument for making the prediction privately and letting the outcome speak.

Case 4: the person promoted out of their standing

Where it came from. Deep expertise in one system, which made them the person to ask for six years.

What happened. They were promoted to run a group covering four systems, and the standing did not transfer. Expertise makes you the person to ask about your subject; influence is being asked about things beyond it, and that comes from a different source. This is one honest reading of the Peter principle: the promotion was earned by something that does not do the new job.

What worked. Rebuilding from the sources that are not subject-specific, starting with owning a problem across all four systems that nobody wanted. It took most of a year and the first three months felt like a demotion.

Case 5: the person nobody consulted

Where it came from. Nowhere. They were in every meeting, spoke often, were widely liked, and were never asked before a decision.

What was actually happening. Visibility had been mistaken for standing. Being present at a decision is not the same as being consulted before it, and the second happens in a message the day before rather than in the room.

What changed it. Taking the recurring report nobody wanted, and then writing down what it actually showed, which nobody had done. Within two quarters people were checking with them before the meeting rather than hearing from them during it.

The five, side by side

The table sets the five against each other: where the standing came from, what it produced, what it risked, and how long each took.

The three ways it goes

Spent well, on something narrow: stopping a decision about to be made on bad information, backing somebody who is right and unpopular, getting two teams into a room with one specific question.

Spent badly, on preference arguments, on being consulted for its own sake, and on anything whose main effect is that people remember you were involved.

Not spent at all, which is the most common and looks like prudence. Standing that is never used decays, because the habit other people have of checking with you is maintained by the checking being worth it.

Where the four sources come from and how they compound is in workplace influence. The moment-by-moment version is in workplace influence techniques.

Turning standing into a specific request is influence without authority. Case 4 is what happens when authority arrives and the failure mode inverts, described in leadership influence. Case 3's cost is a face problem best handled as described in conflict resolution.

Common questions

Case 3 seems to say I should be right quietly. Is that not just hiding?

It says to make the prediction where it can be checked and let the outcome be public rather than the correction. Writing it down beforehand gives you the record. Announcing afterwards that you called it converts a piece of evidence into a claim, and people discount claims.

Is the document route available if nobody reads documents at my workplace?

Then write the shortest possible version and send it to one person who asked a question. Documents that get read are answers to questions somebody actually asked. Documents nobody reads are usually attempts to write down everything at once.

How do I take the intake job without being stuck in it?

Say at the start how long you are doing it: two quarters, then it moves. That is normal, it gets accepted, and the information advantage survives well past the handover.

I recognize case 5 in myself.

Then the fix is available and it is not more meetings. Take one problem nobody owns, own it, and write down what it actually shows. The first sign of change is somebody checking with you the day before rather than raising it during.

What is the fastest of the four sources?

Position in the flow, because it is a job you can volunteer for rather than a reputation you have to build. The record of being right is the slowest and the strongest, and the two work well together, since being in the flow gives you things worth predicting.