Navigating workplace drama
I caught up with a friend recently and when I asked him how work was he replied, ‘it would be great if it wasn’t for all the drama.’
In 1968 a San Francisco psychiatrist, Stephen Karpman, noticed that the conflicts people get stuck in, tended to follow the same pattern. It was something he first spotted in fairy tales, of all places, and he wanted to create a way to demonstrate the interactions between people involved in conflict. He created a model and called it the Drama Triangle.
Within the drama triangle there are three roles:
- the Victim is someone who feels or acts like they have been wronged (regardless of whether they have or not). They feel helpless, hopeless, paralysed by fear and unable to make decisions. Their mindset is one of ‘poor me’.
- the Persecutor is critical, argumentative, rigid in their thinking, judgemental and superior in their actions and communications. They display little to no empathy and will insist (to the victim) that ‘it's all your fault’.
- the Rescuer feels a sense of responsibility to help the victim (‘I’m here for you’). Yet for all their good intentions, the rescuer is an enabler and gives the victim permission to fail. They become an emotional sponge and lose focus on themselves.
In his research, Karpman found that the ‘drama’ can expand if multiple linked triangles form. He also found that nobody keeps the same part for long. They switch. And while everyone is busy switching roles and triangles, the problem (and the drama it creates) doesn’t actually change.
Do you recognise this endless drama cycle of blame, victimhood and sympathy? What Karpman saw between two people also plays out across whole teams.
A combatant culture runs on Persecutors - friction as motivation, blame as an immediate mode of communication, critical by default.
A pleasant culture is full of Rescuers - endlessly nice, consultative, and unwittingly enabling poor performance because nobody wants to have the tough conversation.
A stagnant culture is a room of Victims - apathy, missed deadlines and a shared belief that they will never be valued and nothing will ever change, so why bother to try?
This isn't harmless office politics. As I wrote about recently Acas estimates workplace conflict costs UK employers billions of pounds a year and the bulk of it isn't the drama itself, but what the drama eventually drives people to do: resign, or be dismissed. It's exhausting and de-motivating long before it gets that far.
The way out is to move to the centre of the triangle: be sensitive, responsible, keep your eyes on a solution - even when the solution might be to walk away. Don't wait to be rescued. Don't rescue. Ask for what you need, say no to what you don't, and let people carry their own share.
Every culture has a little drama in it. The vibrant ones just refuse to give it the leading role.
