Favoritism In The Workplace

Favoritism in the workplace can manifest itself in many different ways. Sometimes, knowing the right people can be more important in some companies than knowing the right things.

It's just like the old saying says: It's not what you know, it's who you know.

Fortunately in most cases this is probably not the norm and is most likely the exception rather than the rule but you might experience this sort of situation in your career and need to figure out how to deal with it.

In my career, I can think of one example of what I think would be fairly described as favoritism in the workplace. In one company I worked for, there was a manager who was quickly moving up the ranks in the company and was obviously a favorite of the CEO.

As time went on this person got promoted over other people and as they moved up the ladder and got more senior positions, they always seemed to promote people who they'd worked with in the past.

They also hired people from other companies that they used to work with.

It seemed that this manager had a small group of people who were perceived as being "friends" of theirs. Word got around the company I worked for that this was sort of how things worked.

Certainly over time, it became a talking point in the company when a new person was hired in a fairly senior position. The first question that was usually asked around the water cooler was usually related to where this new person had worked together with the manager!



In other words, it was always assumed that any new person that was hired was a friend of the manager and the question was related to "when" the two had worked together and not "if".

You've probably heard about how managers and even senior executive often "take people with them" to their new position so this is not necessarily uncommon.

Sometimes it results in people who are in the existing position(s) getting fired so that the manager can put "their people" in these jobs instead.

Favoritism
I get a lot of requests for information on favoritism in the workplace. Here is a more in-depth discussion of workplace favoritism.