When I reflect on my time in corporate America the main thing that stands out to me is how many business leaders I inadvertently pissed off for the absolute pettiest of reasons. Reasons so petty that they have taken me a full decade to process.In my last professional role I knew something was deeply wrong within the first week. I was at a goodbye lunch and farewell cake was being served. My director asked me if I wanted a slice and I said no thanks. He asked me again and I repeated myself. And again. This clearly bothered him for some reason. Psychologically his need to assert his dominance was so overwhelming that he actually asked me a fourth time while serving me a slice. It really gave him a genuine thrill, I could tell. That’s just how it starts, folks. People will talk a lot of bullshit about social skills in the workplace, but the truth is they're hardly social skills so much as social defenses from genuine predators who are giddy to lord power over anyone they can — often because their personal lives are falling apart. All that it takes to offend / trigger such people is refusing a slice of cake. They're so keenly attuned to their neuroses that it really just takes one whiff of self respect to set them off. It’s also not exactly hard to sniff out, because everyone else around dropped their dignity years ago. He teamed up with my manager and they continually sabotaged my work and played interference so that I had zero direct visibility to VPs. No one ever heard my side of the story, I just quietly exited once I accepted what was going on. This same director came to despise me so much that he dismissed work I did on my own initiative that directly would have saved the company a material amount of money. It was too painful for him to think of giving me credit even if it would have been good for him too. Earlier in my career I worked in a brokerage. A new VP who knew nothing about the industry or investing joined and mentioned he put his holiday bonus in some inverse market ETFs. I told him inverse ETFs were intended for daytrading and he just reflexively said “I know” in a manner such that it was pretty obvious he, well, didn’t actually know. He hated me after that. In my next role, I was paired with a younger superstar manager and we were doing highly impactful (9 figure) work for the company. We were crushing it. I got passed over for promotion because I wore Adidas stadium pants and it pissed off the VP. Due to stack ranking someone had to be on bottom and the VP wanted to promote a guy who played soccer because that was his college sport too. I sat in on one of that guy’s presentations and he hadn’t even updated the executive summary but the VP just shrugged it off and promoted him anyway.Another thing that can really piss people off in the workplace is advocating for shareholders. Especially in tech, where there is generally zero culture of profitability. When I was the lead marketing analyst at a tech company I had a great relationship with my line manager — right up until I started pushing back against his profligate “revenue ops”. He undoubtedly made sure I got targeted in mass layoffs at the first chance. He was already looking for an excuse to turn on me though because I was a genuinely happy person and he was the type who wanted to lead every meeting with a tone of how miserable everything is. My most brilliant manager and I had an incredible streak working together as a 2 man team. Because I respected his intelligence I naturally played kowtow and there were no issues. But when the team grew and others challenged him, even slightly, he started to melt down and the whole team turned toxic. He even turned on me. It was honestly just sad to see. My point with this article is that you need to be really careful with how you manage your own social reflection. You can always be more socially graceful and that skill is worth developing, but there are also just a lot of purely miserable personalities out there who will try to keep you down for absolutely no valid reason. Some people in corporate will target you just because you’re happy. And if you hear about someone who failed out of corporate America — it’s more likely because they did a great job than because they did a poor one.