The 3 Types of MicroBetrayals within a Corporate Betrayal
In my corporate betrayal research, I’ve realized a key reason why a corporate betrayal is so hard to get over. It’s because it’s never just the single betrayal. While the person who betrayed you may be the main culprit, there is a ripple effect of betrayals within that betrayal, and each one slices the cut deeper in its own way. Here are the 3 main categories of microbetrayal I’ve identified.
The Ripple Effect: 3 MicroBetrayal Types
The Accomplices. These are the people who may not have done the actual betraying, but they somehow enabled the betrayal and the betrayer. Maybe it was a supposed work friend who saw what really happened and didn’t speak up. Maybe it was the fairweather executive sponsor who had your back when you were flying high, and promptly turned on you once you were damaged goods. Maybe it was the HR person who didn’t handle the situation professionally. Who let you down in your betrayal? Who could have helped you but didn’t?
Your old identity. When you are betrayed, there is a betrayal of yourself. Or at least, how you perceived yourself. For example, before my betrayal, I prided myself on a certain identity: the identity of someone who was smart, savvy, and saw through fake people with my amazing people skills, like the ace ex-reporter that I was. When I got blindsided by my duplicitous boss, it felt like being hit by a mack truck. I no longer felt savvy and shrewd at all. I felt like the world’s most gullible idiot, ignoring the bouquet of red flags that had been waving in my face the whole time. Or as I talk about in this blog post, maybe you always thought of yourself as sweet and positive, and now you feel like a Bitter Betty. How was your sense of identity affected by your betrayal?
The Institutions. We all have hallowed institutions that we have put on a pedestal. When I was betrayed by a female boss, it shook my root beliefs to the very core. I began to question my most sacred institutions, including Feminism and Hard Work, two of my biggest values. For many of the women I’ve talked to, they have told me their belief in their Industry Institution was shaken. They believed Nonprofits, or Academia, or Healthcare, or whatever field, was supposed to be about helping people and be above all the pettiness, but it wasn’t. Many of us who grew up in America in particular believe that hard work and career are a kind of secular religion, the one thing that can never let us down—until it does. Some of us held Human Resources in very high regard, only to realize those people were the biggest jokes of all.
Which one of these speaks to you the most? What would you add to the list?
If you resonated with this post or have been a victim of a professional betrayal yourself, I would love for you to find healing by checking out my digital course “Woman in the Arena: How to Turn a Professional Betrayal into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Your Career Using the G.R.A.C.E Method.”