In my experience the truly impossible collaborations always involved people who wanted to play politics, take credit for stuff they didn't do, undermine me etc.
On the other hand I was almost always able to remove friction if the person I was working with was well-intentioned and non-political.
As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations, drive out good people, and so on. I have noticed that saying you have a bad actor reflects poorly on the people doing the hiring (this insulated one of the bad actors until all of the relevant hiring parties left), but so much of it seems like willful disregard. I find myself sometimes amazed at how easily greased people are by snake oil salesmen selling largely themselves and a kind of "don't even worry about it" optimism.
If we all had to have evidence and proof of our skills and honesty, meritocratic hiring would be the standard.
Absolutely. In my experience there are vicious cycles at play. Political people (that's my name for bad actors) seem on average better at identifying whether somebody is political or not. They are also better at reinforcing each other. Political people will tend to hire and promote political people since that's the game they understand. Non-political people might tend to promote more of their own kind, but they will probably be worse at spotting the political kind, hence they will make more mistakes wrt promoting competence.
Come to think of it this whole thing seems quite amenable to some sort of evolutionary game theory. Maybe in conjunction with social network theory. I'm curious if anybody studied this already.
They're not evil, they're just a wet blanket, and you're not a good person, at least not per se, for opposing them -- maybe they're right?
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of assholes is that good men do nothing."
This happens more often in family business, although there are lots of blue blood in many large enterprise as well.
Sometimes I just want to get the job done, I dont want a full blown internal war with another team.
It may be even more prevalent in large corporations. Wherever there are many layers of management there's a lot of room for people who like climbing the greasy pole.
Someone who is not well-intentioned would rank very low on the "Interest" scale. Where they rank on the "Power" scale is independent of their intentions.
Google mostly returned SEO garbage on this for me.
Work interactions I guess could be treated as a repeated game with imperfect information. We have to try to refine our priors iteratively.
The way I did it was to be well-intentioned, honest and open with everybody in the beginning and close up as needed. I would determine if somebody was ill-intentioned based on how they reacted to my feedback and based on their general behavior. Do they tend to talk people behind their back? Do they consistently silo information? Do they offer constructive advice? Do they focus on the actual work rather than on attention-seeking? etc.
But indeed the task is not easy and things will never be perfectly clear.