Someone is working against you. Here is how to know.

Someone at work is making things harder for you. Not in an obvious way. Not yelling, not sending nasty emails. But things keep going sideways. Your proposals get questioned in ways other people's don't. Information you needed shows up late or not at all. You get pulled off the project that would have given you the visibility you needed, and the reason never quite makes sense.

You've been telling yourself it's just a personality clash. Maybe they're stressed. Maybe you're reading too much into it. But it keeps happening, and the pattern is getting hard to ignore.

It's not personal. It's structural.

Most people get this wrong. They assume it's personal. They think: this person doesn't like me. Something about me bothers them, and that's why they're doing this. So they try to fix the relationship. They're nicer. They go out of their way to be agreeable. They avoid conflict even more than they already were.

And nothing changes. Because the problem was never personal.

Someone actively working against you at work almost never has anything to do with you as a person. It has to do with what your success costs them. You might be up for the same promotion. Your project, if it lands, might make their project look redundant. Your growing visibility might be eating into their position as the team's go-to person.

Hashim Zaman and Karim Lakhani at Harvard surveyed 335 executives about sabotage in organizations. 71% had witnessed it during their careers. The primary driver wasn't grudges. It was status and job security. 21% of cases were driven by status concerns alone, and another 24% by both status and money. Only 3% were about personal animosity.

When someone is working against you, the first question isn't "what did I do?" It's "what do they lose if I succeed?"

Difficult colleague vs. active blocker

Most people miss a distinction that changes how you respond. A difficult colleague and an active blocker are not the same thing.

A difficult colleague is hard to work with across the board. They're prickly in meetings, slow to respond to everyone, dismissive of ideas in general. You notice it because it affects you, but it affects everyone. If that sounds like your situation, how to work with a toxic coworker covers the playbook.

An active blocker is different. The friction is selective. It's aimed at you, or at the specific outcomes that threaten their position. They're fine with other people. They might even be well-liked. But when it comes to your work, your proposals, your visibility, the pushback is steady and it always points in the same direction.

That's the distinction most engineers miss. They see friction and assume the person is just difficult. But if the pattern only shows up when your success is on the line, that's not personality. That's incentive.

Four signs you're dealing with an active blocker

Selective resistance. They push back on your ideas in ways they don't push back on others. Same meeting, same format, different treatment. If their skepticism tracks with your proposals but not with comparable ones from teammates, that's a pattern worth noticing.

Information withholding. You're consistently the last to know about decisions, changes, or context that affects your work. Not because you're out of the loop organizationally. Because someone is keeping you there. Duffy, Ganster, and Pagon found in their Academy of Management Journal research that undermining behaviors like withholding information were more damaging to outcomes than simply lacking social support. That difference matters. Nobody helping you is one thing. Someone making sure you don't get what you need is another.

Scope redirection. You keep getting moved off the work that would give you the strongest case for promotion. It's always framed as a business need or a team priority. But the effect is the same every time: you end up further from the outcome that would help your career. If this keeps happening, you've been at the same level too long explains how stalled scope feeds stalled careers.

Credit dilution. Not the same as someone stealing your work outright. This is subtler. Your contributions get absorbed into team accomplishments. The language shifts from "she built this" to "the team shipped this." Over time, your individual impact gets harder for your manager to point to.

What to do once you see the pattern

The instinct is to confront. Don't. At least not yet. The first move is to understand the incentive. What does this person gain by blocking you? Until you answer that, any conversation you have will feel like a personality complaint, and your manager will treat it like one. Before you say anything, read the room and figure out who has a stake in the outcome.

If you're competing for the same promotion, the blocking behavior has a natural expiration date. It will escalate around review cycles and calm down after. That tells you something: the problem is structural, not relational. You don't need to fix the person. You need to make your case independently of them.

If the issue is territory, if your success threatens their role or their status as the go-to person, that's a longer game. The move there is to find alignment where you can. People protect what they feel is being taken. If you can position your work as expanding their domain rather than replacing it, the incentive to block you fades.

When you can't fix it directly

One more thing that most career advice skips. You might be right about all of this and still not be able to fix it directly. Some blocking behavior is baked into how the team is structured. Overlapping scopes, shared promotion slots, ambiguous ownership. In those cases, the blocker is responding rationally to a bad system.

That doesn't mean you do nothing. It means you shift your strategy.

• Document your contributions so they exist independently of anyone else's account
• Make sure your manager has direct access to your work, not filtered through the person blocking you
• Build relationships with stakeholders who can speak to your impact from their own experience

The engineers who handle active blockers well don't spend energy trying to change the blocker's behavior. They route around it. They make their work visible through channels the blocker doesn't control.

Key takeaways

• Workplace sabotage is driven by status and job security, not personal grudges. 71% of executives in the Harvard study had witnessed it. Only 3% of cases involved personal animosity.
• A difficult colleague is hard on everyone. An active blocker targets your outcomes specifically. Which one you're dealing with changes what you do about it.
• The four signs: selective resistance, information withholding, scope redirection, and credit dilution. If the friction only appears when your success is on the line, that's incentive, not personality.
• Don't confront until you understand the incentive. Map what they lose if you succeed. Then route around the blocker by making your work visible through channels they don't control.

---

CareerClimb's AI coach Summit helps you document your work and build your promotion case independently, so no single person can block your visibility. Download CareerClimb