The Office Assassin

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A Competitive Streak Run Amok

Wow. Your friend sounds like a real piece of work, by which I mean, she sounds pretty awful: manipulative, prone to gaslighting … even abusive. This isn’t about competitiveness. This is about profound toxicity, and, I suspect, insecurity, because someone who is truly confident about what they do professionally and how they do it, is not likely to engage in such destructive and pathological behavior.

But let’s put your friend’s insecurity aside for a second. Though I understand your question is about whether you should raise your concerns with her, some part of me wonders whether you even want to — or should — be friends with her in the first place. It’s not just what she did to the former employee, but what she claims she will do to the next person. It’s sick that she even thinks that way. And if she’s so smart and competent, it would probably follow that she is smart enough to know that she’s behaved in not just an “unprofessional,” but totally abhorrent way.

Another word that gives me pause: “contempt.” Whether your friend used that word herself or it’s a descriptor of your own, it’s a red flag of enormous proportions. As is the fact that your friend seems to train her sights on other women. Just listen to your own experiences: Though you don’t elaborate on previous conflicts with her, it doesn’t sound like you’ve been immune to your friend’s manipulations or machinations. In fact, quite the opposite.

I ask you this: What might you — and what might your friend — get out of having a discussion about her “competitiveness”? Do you really think that someone who spends so much time bullying another woman out of her job and calls it a “professional victory” is likely to actually listen to what you have to say in any serious or sustained way? “Unprofessional?” Yeah, you could call her that. Quite frankly, however, she sounds dangerous. You don’t need to agonize whether or not to confront her with the harms her behavior has wrought. You just need to run. Run far, far away.