You know the type: Staff in middling positions just powerful enough that they can cloud anyone's sunny day when they choose. A recent essay in the Harvard Business Review on keepers of gates and keys and other essential resources who abuse their powers offers useful advice.
But first a story about how my dad dealt with a low-status tormentor in his life.
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The jack would not hand over the money he owed us. We had just delivered two hundred pounds of potatoes in sacks and stacked them neatly on the shelves of his two-bit neighborhood grocery store. Now he refused to pay. "Nope, not gonna pay. Maybe later," John Booth said crossly as he wiped his hands on his apron and sauntered into the back of his store.As a teenager helping my dad run the potato route from our farm, I hated John Booth's grocery. He had no complaints about our potatoes or our service. He didn't have money problems. He just took pleasure in being ornery.Every few weeks, after we'd spent ten minutes heaving sacks of spuds from our truck onto his shelves and it was time to collect payment, he'd pull his pointless go-slow stunt. Just for the heck of it. Sometimes we'd go on and come back later. Other times we'd hang around and wait him out. My dad would go and coax a bit. In the end we always got the cash, but often only after a wait of fifteen minutes or more.I sat with a knot in my gut in our delivery truck, bored and confused, while we waited. There was work at home, yet here we sat. Worse was seeing my dad, a patient man whose intelligence and good humor won respect from everyone else, reduced to helplessness by this bent stick of a grocery man.Running a neighborhood grocery in a small town, John Booth was but a few rungs above the bottom of the social ladder. Yet in a perverse way he held rather significant power over us, at least after we'd lugged our potatoes onto his shelves. My father's need for customers and his reluctance to make a scene allowed Booth to lord it over a busy working man and his earnest sons for a quarter of an hour whenever he felt like it.Why?Lacking status hurts, say the HBR authors: "It makes us feel bad about ourselves and makes us want to act out against others." Low status people refrain generally from such behavior out of fear of consequences. But in moments when they occupy roles that give them power, they are no longer inhibited.The result can be widespread social conflict, as people seek respite from their bad feelings about themselves by exercising power in hostile ways against anyone unable or unwilling to create consequences.Although the HBR study examines only workplace dynamics, perhaps it goes without saying that we live in a time of increasing attacks by people of modest means but low educational and economic status against completely powerless people, such as immigrants.What to do? The Harvard study suggests:
A natural problem-solver, my dad found the inner strength to respond in ways remarkably similar to those recommended in the HBR study for peers and colleagues of low-status, high-power persons: Recognize that such persons often harbor insecurities related to their lack of status. "Go out of your way to show respect," the authors recommend. "They will appreciate it, and you will stand out as an ally in the future."For my dad, that meant forbearance with Booth. Though his frustration was apparent, I never witnessed him reply disrespectfully. I have no idea if he ever won appreciation from the quirk. But he got the things he cared about most: He held faithful to his personal code of decency, he avoided escalating a dicey situation, and he retained Booth as a much-needed customer.
