How to Manipulate Your Coworkers Using Reverse Psychology Techniques
By: Rand Grey
Tags: Humor, Satire, Workplace, Reverse Psychology, Psychology Tricks

Life is a game of Chess. Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel

In this article, I will show you how to use reverse psychology techniques to catapult your career.

You too can improve your workplace influence by:

Bending the Will of Your Employees like a Jedi

Getting your Ideas Heard by People Who Usually Ignore You

Obtaining Support from the C-level Executives

We’ll start with a simple example you can try at home.

Practicing the Science of Reverse Psychology at Home

Typically people recommend using reverse psychology on young children. This can be a great place to practice before using it in your workplace. For example, the following happens in our house every night with our three-year-old.

CHILD: “I’m not going to bed!”

ME: “Go to bed, now!”

CHILD: “No, I’m not tired!”

ME: “I don’t care, go to bed!”

CHILD: “Never, never, never!”

ME: “Ok, fine! I’m going to chase you around the house until you fall and hit your head and we’re back to the Emergency Room!”

CHILD: “Good luck catching me you fat old bastard!”

Ok, that’s not really an example of reverse psychology at all, but we all agree that reverse psychology can trick others to do what they don’t want to do. I’ve carried what I’ve learned from my intense study of online mommy blogs into the office. I’ve found what works well on kids works even better on adults.

Bending the Will of Your Employees like a Jedi

Case Study #1: My objective is to get Raj (name changed to protect the innocent) to only use his vacation time when there is nothing to do in the office. I tell him to do the opposite of what I really want him to do.

ME: “Raj, you should use your vacation time during the busy season. You should come into the office around Christmas because there is nothing to do and it will be super chill.”

RAJ: “You’re right! Instead, I’ll take time off when we have crazy deadlines. I’ll see you on December 23rd!”

Hmm.. Ok, that wasn’t quite my plan. Let me give you another example where I convince Raj to work longer hours by telling him to work less.

ME: “Raj, you should leave work earlier. For work-life balance, it’s not good to work past 5pm.”

RAJ: “Ok, good call. I’ll start leaving everyday at 4pm sharp.”

That one didn’t go too well. But, in hindsight, Raj has been one of my most loyal employees and fixes almost all of our emergencies that happen after normal business hours.

Getting Ideas Heard by People Who Usually Ignore You

Case Study #2: My objective here is to improve my company’s product. Let’s say you want to get a new feature into the product, but no one ever listens to your ideas because they’re lame. Try reverse psychology.

ME: “Jenn, I think we should be removing features instead of adding new features.”

JENN: “OMG, you are a freakin genius! Simplicity is key. Let’s cut all the crap out, I’ll get on it — we can deprecate 50% of our functionality!”

Clients were happy that our product finally did one thing really well. And customer satisfaction improved dramatically. Although I didn’t get the feature I wanted, this little stroke of genius did land me a promotion which gave me more influence.

Obtaining Support from the C-level Executives

Case Study #3: My objective here is to convince the C-level team to outsource more mundane projects. My engineering team was too bright for this work so I had to do something to protect them. Again, I accomplish this by asking our CTO to do the exact opposite of what I want.

ME: “My team has a lot of bandwidth. I think we should fire some contractors and my team can take on more of the mundane work as well.”

CTO: “Great idea! You the man! Effective immediately, your team owns four times the workload. We’ll spend the contractor budget on lattes.”

Not what I expected. And, after a few weeks, even with the constant caffeine intake, my team eventually burnt out. Most of them quit (excepting Raj). When they all quit, the company had no choice but to offshore 100% of the work. Now my team is entirely offshore and Raj takes care of any issues. I “work” (using air quotes here) from my beachfront home in Mexico for most of the year.

Moving Beyond the Workplace

Obviously I had a good thing going. So, I decided to go big. After a long morning of reading the newspaper and eating hard-boiled eggs, I approached my spouse with my most strategic reverse psychology trick to date.

ME: “I think we should have sex less often. Do you want to just talk at night?”

Well, let’s just say, the rest is history.

And, by “history,” I mean that we eventually grew tired of each other’s lengthy verbal replay of everything that happened each day. We starting wearing bluetooth headphones at all times and slowly drifted apart. I later married the house helper who, thanks to language differences, has no idea what I’m saying. She also happens to possess an abnormally strong libido. Raj, as you might have guessed, was my best man.