Backstabbing | 5 signs that you can't trust your co-workers

An office should be a supportive environment. Ideally, colleagues should be willing each other to succeed and contribute collectively to the continued success of their company.

Good leaders constantly preach the importance of collaboration to achieve greatness and whilst this may sound, for lack of a better word ‘hokey’, professionals in such environments will discover that collaborating freely with those around them does indeed lead to greater productivity and an overall supportive work environment. Yet in a lot of companies, this simply isn’t how it works.

For some, the drive to raise their profile, climb the corporate ladder and do as little as possible far outweighs the drive to contribute to a positive environment and support their fellow peers. The problem is that the latter often preys on the former, creating a toxic and ultimately unsustainable environment for everyone, in which trust doesn’t exist and everyone is constantly waiting for a colleague to somehow sabotage them.

Often, this takes the form of a line manager-to-worker relationship; this is usually because the line manager has bullied and manipulated their way into a senior position whilst others picked up the workload. Catching such people can be almost impossible, as they’ve managed to make a corporate career out of their talent to leech off other workers – and they’re good at it. But it’s not impossible, and the first step is to identify such an individual.