Why Is My Boss Playing Favorites?

Dear Stanley,
There are 12 members on our team, and although my boss seems to be a nice guy, everyone on our team feels that he is favoring one particular colleague. He's always showering him with more than his share of credit and attention. He asks him to lunch frequently; they play golf together; they have drinks after work and have closed door discussions on projects that all of us work on. I don't think that there's anything romantic going on since they're both males and also married. But at this point, it's disconcerting to everyone on the team. What could be the reason for him to make us feel like our work is going unrecognized?
Snubbed

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Dear Crybaby,

Ooh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. But come on. The boss has a favorite? Of course he does. All bosses have favorites. You've been reading too many business books about the Excellence of Management. The higher the boss, the more in touch with his "inner child" he or she is likely to be. That means giving free rein to their full complement of emotions - greed, envy, love, hate, jealousy, competitive verve, you name it. Successful people are the ones who let their full selves hang out all over the place. It's the middle managers and lower folk on the ladder who tiptoe around thinking about the wrong and right ways to do thing -- and wonder why the boss seems driven by human emotions and even acts like a spoiled child at times.

Your boss probably has a professional man-crush on a competent and sympathetic employee. The rest of you are jealous and don't think this is "business-like" -- but you're wrong. It's the height of business. Business is based on trust, particularly within a company or department. People work side-by-side for years and learn who they can rely on, not only to do good work but also to watch their backs. After a time, a symbiotic relationship is established between workers who can fit that mold and their boss. Sometimes it's hard to figure out who is supposed to be working for whom. The German philosopher Hegel, who is pretty much unintelligible on every other subject, referred to this phenomenon as the "master-slave" relationship, and it defines many power relationships in our world, including most of those between senior executives and their assistants, where it's sometimes tough to see where the boss's power ends and the assistant's begins.

Accept the affection your boss shows for his chosen one. Depending on the leader's nature, this will either last forever or, in time, moderate and allow others to congregate around the hearth. In some cases, you may even see the very close associate turn into dead meat, a most gratifying development for those who suffer from terminal schadenfreude. In fact, this happens quite frequently. The only thing worse than being the enemy of Josef Stalin, for example, was being his friend. Both were killed with alarming regularity. It was the guys in the middle who stuck around and outlived the boss. So while there are certainly downsides to not being the chosen one, there are also benefits. The squeaky wheel is often the one that gets greased.