The ‘me monster’.
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Give a narcissist a compliment on Monday and he’ll want a cookie on Tuesday, a concession on Wednesday and a favor on Thursday. By Friday he’ll be running for President.
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Roger That! Don’t reward bad behavior, ever!
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There’s no end to it if you do. By May he’ll be firing you on national TV for investigating his Russian collusion.
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This. If you are a remotely healthy organization, you just don’t have people on the sociopathic spectrum working for you. Thank god I am senior at a small company, one that has an amazing culture and values and most of all team. It’s like my family/friends, and we can choose who to bring into the fold. And thank goodness we have a great clientele for the most part, and really just don’t go out of our way to work with folks and organizations who are utterly oppositional. We have to work with all types of outside organizations both on the vendor and client sides, and not all of them support things we agree with, and some of them definitely have narcissists on-board. But as far as who we would populate our own staff with? No effin’ way.
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Let me summarize that for you.
Kiss their ass.
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What I do at MY job is remind people that I am the best at everything, including dealing with narcissists.
We all have a poker game on Fridays.
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Maybe I’m just dense, but it seems to me the article says the way to “deal with” a narcissist at work is to give him everything he wants.
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Right? I honestly didnt find this article realistic.
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Possibly it would be considered a compliment:
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I have a sibling-in-law who is a classic narcissist, and a really stupid GOP, religious, Trump supporter to boot. Really pissed us off at holiday time a couple years ago. My sibling was no help and has basically stopped talking to me, because (I think) of my outright anger at this idiot’s behavior. So I don’t plan to see them again if I can help it. (“Oh, we don’t travel anymore.”)
Fortunately my spouse’s family is uniformly wonderful, and we have great times with them.
ETA: By adding “religious” above I don’t mean to be bigoted. I guess it’s just that this person’s behavior at times seems so completely counter to the teachings of most of the world’s religions.
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I just call those people fundies or zealots so as not to confuse them with the majority of good people of the world’s many faiths.
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I suspect that even now, the value of this response bifurcates based on gender. Women still can’t get away with this shit as much, and it will affect their truthfulness.
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I’ve found that a good approach is to serve up the compliment sandwiches just a bit too much, but with apparent sincerity. Just enough for the narcissist to realize that something’s not quite right, but not enough to give them a good handle on just what’s happening. “Is he just a really nice/friendly guy? …Or is he playing me? If this is insincere, then what could the possible endgame be?”
Keep them teetering on the edge of uncertainty long enough, and you won’t have to avoid said narcissist, they’ll avoid you! (and it can be a bit fun as well).
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So…have you tried using these methods on Cory yet?..
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“Who’s a good boss?”
“YOU ARE!”
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Maybe I’m just dense, but it seems to me the article says the way to “deal with” a narcissist at work is to give him everything he wants.
Pretty much. The real takeaway is that the narcissist demands what you would give to decent people anyhow, and they will get very angry and try to hurt you if you don’t give them that. So if you have a narcissist that can make your life difficult and you can’t do anything about, you have to pretend they’re a decent human being, contrary to your instincts - unless you’ve got the energy to fight mister High School Quarterback Who Has Nothing Better To Do but play office politics.
But you can have fun with it. We have three millennials at work (small company!), and two of them completely put the lie to the stereotype - hard workers, very smart, great guys, very articulate, just what you’d expect from smart motivated mid 20s people of any generation. I love working with them and mentoring them even though I’m not their boss. When working with these guys I genuinely praise them frequently. It’s just natural with good people.
The other guy is the total stereotype, a raging lazy narcissist who’s only on board because he’s the HR lady’s nephew. I’m not his boss, and am not willing to fight the HR lady over him, so I lavish insincere praise on him that he just laps up to the point where everyone else who hates dealing with this twat is trying hard not to choke out loud. Yeah, I’m being an asshole - but he’s not mine to discipline, he loves it, and it makes up for all the problems he causes with his selfishness.
I guess the takeaway is ‘treat narcissists like you would treat decent people, but in bad faith because you can’t do it in good faith, and then you might as well have fun with it.’
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Pardon the sarcasm, can can anyone help me to develop a full blown narcissistic personality disorder, please?
It looks like the real deal: people will be nice to me, tell me how great I am, maybe get out of their way to accommodate me. Eventually, because comparison with others is what “narcissistic” is about, they will also tell my colleagues that they are not as good as me. Ideally, I would be promoted while they are not, because money is the best compliment.
As an added bonus, I will always feel right, always feel entitled, be immune to criticism and have more sexual partners than average. Maybe even more kids and pass my genes into the future.
Seems like a great life to me.
If our society starts to accommodate for the abusers and the parasites, I also want to be an abuser and a parasite. What could possibly go wrong?
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You could end up with 45.
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Now that I know WHY people are praising me all day there will be HELL to PAY!
Thanks, BoingBoing!
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