Gaslighting in corporate culture is very common and pervasive and is one of the most destructive aspects of corporate America. It eats away at your self-esteem and makes you doubt everything that you do. It is also very frustrating and prevents real-work and collaboration and makes you doubt every aspect of your worklife.

So, you ask, why does this occur in corporate America? What does gaslighting look like? How do I know if I am being gaslit?

Gaslighting can occur in corporate America many times due to the competitive nature of the workplace and the need to be seen and validated by leadership. If a person feels that their job or their reputation at work may be threatened or if they are hiding the fact that they really do not know how to do their job, a person can use gaslighting as a tactic to deflect away from their own inadequacies.

A Professional Gaslighter is excellent at deflection, moving the goalposts, lying, over or understating a fact or plain ignoring facts, and is highly manipulative. The very good ones have leadership eating out of their hands, which makes them dangerous.

Gaslighters hide incompetence and fear behind lies, false bravado and psychological games. They deflect, obfuscate, and dismiss colleagues as overreacting all so that they can be in control of the narrative. The Gaslighter professes to know everything but takes accountability for nothing.

Gaslighters deny that they ever said anything or did anything that you say that they did. This manifests itself in the office setting in many ways. One way is, say you are working on a project and the gaslighter is the person who is in charge of gathering requirements to complete the project successfully to the customer’s liking. They tell everyone that they have all of the needed requirements and that they know exactly what needs to be done to complete the project. Later, the customer comes back and says that the work completed is useless and that the requirements in the project were not what they understood was going to be done.

The Gaslighter then acts shocked that the project was not completed with the correct requirements and starts to blame other employees for completing the tasks incorrectly even though they were the ones who were supposed to gather the requirements in the first place. They then deny any wrongdoing and refuse to take any accountability in the project leaving their colleagues to look bad in front of leadership.

Another example is, let’s say you came up with a great idea for an improvement at work, you present the idea to a group of coworkers and The Gaslighter says it’s a bad idea and does not like it. Later, in a different meeting, one in which leadership is attending, The Gaslighter acts as if the idea is a great idea and that they thought of it and not you. They present the idea to leadership as though it was their idea.

The result of gaslighting can be damaged work relationships, distrust, stress and anxiety, anger, failed projects and more.

The only effective tool against gaslighters is to record everything. Record every meeting, get everything in writing in an email chain with multiple people on it. Document every incident of gaslighting with actual facts to back up what you are saying and share with your manager or HR. Also, never meet with The Gaslighter alone in a 1 on 1 meeting; always have others in the meeting so that they can back you up. Set firm boundaries with The Gaslighter, stating facts and specifics.

It can be daunting to have to document everything and treat your co-worker like the enemy, but in the end can be helpful and hopefully stop the gaslighting from occurring.