Relational Intelligence is your toxic workplace superpower
Make it harder to scapegoat you
My thing is developing frameworks and methods derived from reality tests rather than a synthesis of theories and evidence from academic disciplines and peer reviewed journals. You won’t find this framework anywhere else, although you might recognise parts of it without the mechanism that explains why they work. If you're looking for more than theory and want something you can action in your own difficult workplace situation, this is for you.
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Readers note: This is an updated version of an article I originally published in 2025.
Most workplace advice fails because it assumes you’re working with psychologically healthy people. Organisations waste spend millions developing leadership capability while allowing one narcissistic executive to undo most of the benefit before lunch.
Many institutionally-backed leadership experts have never had to survive a true low trust workplace. It’s easy to recommend transparency when nobody has ever used your honesty against you. Their advice assumes people actually want to work with you. That assumption doesn’t hold up in workplaces actively endorsing and protecting leaders demonstrating narcissistic behaviour, political self protection, and image management.
The modern workplace is full of people harbouring unresolved conflicts from past jobs, betrayals by former colleagues, and wounds from systems that were meant to protect them. Some turn up ready to collaborate while others continue fighting the same battle with new people. Narcissistic leaders, psychopathic CEOs, politically skilled but ethically bankrupt managers, and HR leaders who protect the image instead of the people are part of everyday organisational life and influence how everyone else behaves.
You’ve entered the hidden social system that exists inside every workplace without realising it. The people who navigate that system well aren’t always the smartest or the most capable but the most competent at recognising the incentives driving other people’s behaviour.
That’s relational intelligence1.
Over the past decade, I have worked with professionals navigating scapegoating, bullying, and politically complex workplaces while developing and applying relational practices that make collaboration possible in low trust environments. I kept seeing the same workplace dynamics that existing leadership frameworks couldn’t explain, so I developed one that could.
Relational intelligence isn’t another corporate buzzword or a rebranding of emotional intelligence. It’s a practical framework for navigating workplaces and professional networks that’s essential when trust is low, politics inform decisions, and technical competence alone is insufficient to protect one’s credibility and career.
It’s often reduced to self-awareness, empathy, or the ability to read people. None of those is sufficient. People misread each other every day, convince themselves they’re right, then behave as though their interpretation is fact. Relational intelligence is the discipline of treating your own judgement as provisional, testing it against reality, refining it as other people’s behaviour reveals the incentives driving them, and adjusting your own behaviour accordingly. It’s an indispensable process when working with narcissistic leaders, other dark tetrad characters and their bureaucratic enablers who protect those people instead of the people.
None of this guarantees you won’t become a target. Responsibility for scapegoating always rests with the people and institutions that create and sustain it. Relational intelligence helps you identify the hidden social system early, understand how it operates, and respond with greater precision before relationships begin to deteriorate.
