Early in my career, I worked at a large organization whose senior leadership was all expatriates. And I’m still in awe of how the head of HR — a man who had started off as a small-time administrative clerk — had accumulated so much political power and internal clout that he was effectively advising the very foreigners who were running the place.
He had built his own community of loyalists, crafted policies that simply couldn’t be contested, and made an entire group of employees plead for their most basic rights. Close to a hundred people had formed a committee with one mission — to fight back or get this person removed. Nothing came of it.
I felt it personally, too. A sponsorship request was denied, a salary band I couldn’t escape no matter what I did, and the slow realization that the policies had been designed to keep certain people exactly where they were. I stayed two more years. I could never forget how much power one person can accumulate inside an organization when nobody is watching — or when the people watching simply don’t want to act.
At the organizational level, it’s a version of the Cold War — you can feel the tension, but nobody names it. Day-to-day work becomes a drudgery. Fear creeps in, paranoia sets in, and people start fighting for the smallest things — break times, work volume, salary components — because deep down, what they really fear is that their rights will be taken away if they don’t push back. The actual power struggle never gets discussed. It just leaks out everywhere else.
How would you know if you’ve fallen into this trap? For me, it’s the moment I realize I’m spending more time convincing people, fighting fires, and proving my rationale than actually doing the work. In my experience, all the time spent building business cases and proposals is futile — because someone with more influence than me has already made a decision.
You’ve probably seen this when a colleague raises their concerns with solid evidence to the people who would listen, only to find them getting frustrated and riled up. The following weeks and months, they find themselves in one dilemma after another, which they never signed up for. Sure, they had the right people’s attention — but for all the wrong reasons. And soon enough, they’re either fired, moved to another department, or sometimes even promoted — setting them up to fail.