Why do people like me at first, then start seeing me as a threat?

When Coworkers Warm Up, Then Cool Off: The Threat Pattern

The flip from liked to threatening is almost always a status signal in the room, not a flaw in you. Psychologists Gerben van Kleef and Tanya Menon trace it to perceived rivalry once you become competent or visible. Sir John Whitmore in Coaching for Performance reframes the fix: lower your apparent competition, raise their apparent agency.

Almost everyone who has changed jobs more than twice has felt this pattern, and almost no one talks about it cleanly. The first month, you’re refreshing. People bring you coffee and tell you the unwritten rules. Around month four or five something subtle shifts. Invitations get vaguer. Feedback gets cooler. The same competence that earned you the early warmth seems to be the thing that’s now putting people on edge. The temptation is to make it about your personality — you must have done something, said something, been too much. In most cases, you didn’t. What changed wasn’t you. What changed was your status in the room.

The clearest research on this comes from social psychologists studying workplace envy, particularly Tanya Menon at Ohio State and Gerben van Kleef at Amsterdam. Their work makes a useful distinction. Envy is the feeling of wanting something another person has — a promotion, a skill, a manager’s attention. Jealousy is the feeling of being about to lose something you already have when a high performer enters the picture. Both can run quietly under collegial behaviour for weeks before anyone notices. The trigger isn’t arrogance on your part, and it usually isn’t even visible success. It’s the moment your colleagues internally upgrade their model of you from “new person we’re helping” to “rival we’re measured against.” That upgrade can happen because you spoke well in a meeting, because a senior person quoted you, or because you fixed something that had been broken for a year. It does not require any miscalculation from you. It just requires the room to do the math.

What makes this disorienting is that the people who flip don’t experience themselves as petty. They experience themselves as fair. Bob Deutsch, the cognitive anthropologist behind The Long Game’s observations on identity, argues that we narrate ourselves into the heroes of our own stories, and any new evidence that destabilises that self-image — including a colleague who suddenly looks more capable — gets quietly metabolised by the brain into a story where you, not their self-concept, are the problem. Hence the cooling. Hence the gossip about your “intensity.” Hence the line, “they’re a bit too much, don’t you think?” This is not malice. It’s identity protection.

So what do you actually do about it? Sir John Whitmore, in Coaching for Performance, offers a reframe that I’ve found more useful than any of the “dim your light” advice that floats around online. His coaching premise is that performance and trust both rise when other people’s sense of agency rises. The mistake high performers make in a new room is unintentional: they bring answers. Answers are useful, but each one delivered to a colleague who didn’t ask for it lowers their apparent competence in their own eyes. Do this for three months and you have not actually offended anyone — you’ve simply made yourself the silent yardstick by which everyone else now feels measured. Whitmore’s GROW model points to the inversion: ask first, suggest later. Not as a manipulation, but as a discipline. “What have you tried?” before “here’s what worked for me.” “What would help you most right now?” before volunteering. The point isn’t to hide your competence; it’s to leave room for theirs.

The second move is to give credit publicly, in specifics, more often than feels natural. Adam Grant’s research on what he calls otherish givers shows that the effect of naming someone’s contribution by name in front of leadership is wildly disproportionate — it costs you nothing, and it converts the very people most at risk of flipping on you into quiet allies. “The data point that unlocked this came from Maria’s catch in last week’s review” is one sentence. It buys you months. The third move, which is harder and slower, is to invest in one or two people’s growth without an agenda. Dorie Clark’s “no asks for a year” rule applies inside an organisation as well as outside it. People stop seeing you as a threat the moment they see you as someone whose success makes their success more likely.

None of this requires you to become smaller. The error in most advice on this topic is the assumption that the only available move is to dim. You don’t have to dim. You have to redistribute — the credit, the questions, the apparent control over the room’s direction. Once you do, the threat signature dissolves, and the same competence that triggered the cooling becomes, again, the thing they like about you. The flip is real. It is also, with patience, reversible.