Three Forces You’re Underestimating at Work
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
There are three things people consistently underestimate in every professional relationship: self-interest, ego, and competition.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s calibration. And the distinction matters.
Self-interest means that everyone is, to some degree, optimizing for their own outcome. That doesn’t make them bad. It makes them human. If they stopped paying you tomorrow, you wouldn’t show up the next day. That’s self-interest. It’s the exchange of value that drives every professional relationship. Pretending it doesn’t exist isn’t kindness. It’s naiveté.
Ego means people care how they’re perceived — sometimes more than they care about the actual outcome. They’ll fight for territory not because the territory matters but because losing it feels like a public diminishment. They’ll resist a good idea because it wasn’t theirs.
Competition means that at senior levels, people are positioning — for resources, attention, the next promotion, proximity to power. Sometimes healthy. Sometimes territorial. Always present.
When you fail to account for these forces, you get surprised by behavior that was actually predictable. You take personally what was never about you. You misread signals that were perfectly clear if you’d been looking for the right things.
I coached a leader who was confused about why a peer seemed to be claiming shared territory. She’d built a story about intentional undermining. When we examined it through this lens, a different picture emerged: the peer had spent her whole career fighting for every inch of ground. She wasn’t against my client. She was against losing what she’d fought to build. The behavior looked identical. The motivation was completely different.
I also want to name the force most professionals miss entirely: the fishing question. When someone above you asks about a specific person or situation unprompted — “How are things with your team? How’s your relationship with Raj?” — assume they’re fishing until proven otherwise. Something prompted the question. It always does. The right response isn’t to answer at face value. It’s to answer carefully, then go find out what prompted it.
You can assume good intent while still accounting for human motivation. Those two things aren’t in conflict. One is a generous posture. The other is clear-eyed awareness. The best leaders hold both at the same time.
Where are you underestimating self-interest, ego, or competition in a relationship that confuses you?
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