When your boss loves you but your colleagues don't

Why do high performers become targets and how can you protect yourself?

The psychology of peer sabotage

When you excel, hostility from colleagues often stems less from your personality and more from insecurity, perceived threats and competition.

If leadership openly favours your work, peers may resent you. Your skills, qualifications or strong client relationships can also make others feel threatened, while some may deliberately withhold information or updates to set you up for mistakes.

In competitive workplaces, your career growth can even be seen as a threat to someone else’s advancement.

How to professionally neutralise sabotage

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If you suspect that this is happening to you, reacting emotionally or engaging in petty office politics will destroy your professional standing and alienate the very leaders who like you. Instead, manage peer sabotage through structured, high-logic interventions.

Sabotage thrives in ambiguous spaces, so you must do away with informal communication. If a colleague promises to deliver critical project data by a specific time, confirm it via email immediately.

In the event they fail to do so, you have a paper trail that clearly identifies the bottleneck without you having to point fingers. 

When a colleague attempts to exclude you from key decisions or take credit for your work, over-communicate project milestones in open, multi-stakeholder forums.

Include your boss and relevant team members on status updates, even on emails, if need be. Transparency deprives saboteurs of the secrecy required to alter narratives.

If the sabotage persists, invite that particular colleague for a brief, professional check-in. Do not accuse them of jealousy or malicious intent, but frame the conversation entirely around operational efficiency.

This signals high emotional intelligence on your part and that you are aware of their tactics, while also putting them on notice that their actions are on your radar.