When the tone is accusatory, critical, personal, sarcastic or bitter, you know you are engulfed in an adversarial struggle,whether you want it or not. More than likely, in addition to a disagreement on issues, you have somehow, perhaps inadvertently, stepped into a land mine of ego, hyper-sensitivity, previously unearthed blunders or organizational power struggle, in which you are marked for organizational demise. Don't roll over. Fight back.

Sun Tzu, of course, was the military genius who formulated timeless strategies for defeating one's enemies. Although those adversaries, who arise from time to time to confront you in the workplace, may not rise to the level of enemies, nonetheless they thwart your progress, can derail your programs, and are capable of slowing or even incinerating your career. Just like the adversaries of old, they must be defeated, vanquished, or "put in a box", a kind of "no fly zone", where they can do no further damage to your career.

How Do You Know When Someone Becomes Your Adversary?

You will know when someone has become an adversary in your workplace, whether you thought of him as one before or not. The person who writes you an email criticizing your actions or policies, and copies half a dozen people ---that person is your adversary. The person who tries to undermine your authority, decrease your credibility, derail your program or prevent your selection for high visibility jobs--- that person is your adversary.

Sometimes we wonder how a person we considered a neutral co-worker, or even a supportive ally could become an adversary overnight. This unsettling turn of events can stem from a genuine disagreement about policy, however, a genuine disagreement usually remains focused on issues and is not enough to fuel the kind of unpleasant confrontation which no one wants, but which can arise in any organization. When the tone is accusatory, critical, personal, sarcastic or bitter, you know you are engulfed in an adversarial struggle, whether you want it or not. More than likely, in addition to a disagreement on issues, you have somehow, perhaps inadvertently, stepped into a land mine of ego, hyper-sensitivity, previously unearthed blunders or organizational power struggle, in which you are marked for organizational demise. Don't roll over. Fight back.

Understand What's At Stake

This is not about petty sniping and carping. This about your career. Your strategic objective is to advance your career. In order to do this, you must continously advance your programs at work and expand your sphere of influence. Your adversaries, on the other hand, are intent on limiting or eradicating your influence and putting your career in the dumpster. You need to take proactive measures to halt the onslaught, regain your ground, and send your adversaries into full retreat.

Develop a Plan and Strategy Before Challenging An Adversary

Let us begin with some basic strategies straight from Sun Tzu:

If a general knows his own strength, the adversary's strength and when and where to fight, he will win. "If a general is able to anticipate when to fight and where to fight, he can defeat the enemy even if he has to travel a thousand miles to fight."

Sun Tzu has a number of rules of thumb about when to fight, but what they all boil down to is the necessity of having overwhelming superiority in order to fight. Odds are, you will not have overwhelming superiority, so you must resort to positioning and strategy to put yourself in a position to win:

Defend Yourself First; Wait for the Right Moment

First, put yourself in an impregnable position, so you will not be defeated, then wait for the right moment, probably provided by your adversary's mistakes.

Probably the simplest way to do this is to make yourself thoroughly familiar with all your organization's rules and strictly adhere to them. Rules may be in the form of By-laws, policies departmental guidelines, or guidelines for compliance with various regulatory agencies. Whatever they are, stick to them religiously, as that will be your protection. Within that protected area, it will be difficult to attack you. In "A Man For All Seasons", Sir Thomas More tried to protect himself by sticking to the letter of the law, and you should do the same.

Respond Immediatley to Any Verbal Attacks

Although one must summon up a little energy to do so, anytime your adversary emails you a complaint, charge, quibble or broadside about any of your actions or behaviors, respond immediately with your side of the issues, copying everyone he copied. Think of yourself as the instant response team of a political party of one. Refuse to let anyone chip away at your credibility without an immediate and definitive response.

If you're in luck, or have some ardent admirers, someone else may respond also and blast him for the criticism and you now have some more potent ammo.

Document His Infractions

By the same token, document each and every one of your adversary's infractions of the rules. When someone decides to "make it personal", there is almost always an infraction of some kind since organizational rules are not designed to make it personal; just the opposite.

He wrote you a memo to stop working on a project, and he had no authority to do so? Write it down. He failed to notify you of a project meeting in which you should have been included? Make a note of it. Each of these infractions may seem small, but when you gather 5 or 6 of them, particularly viewed in the context of a current infraction, they begin to look like a pattern, one which is directed at you, but which is also in violation of organizational rules, so is also a matter of company policy and, as the military would put it, undermines good order.

Strengthen your ties with allies, even if you're outnumbered.

While biding your time, waiting for the right moment, continue to identify allies, and communicate your point of view to neutral observers. At the very least, you can hope to keep them neutral, rather than siding with your adversary by default, since they've heard nothing from you.

Don't make yourself an "open book". Encourage your adversary to be complacent by acting as if it wouldn't occur to you to challenge him or you fully realize you can't challenge him because you couldn't win.

The Right Moment

When you are in a public meeting -- a board meeting, for example-- and things are moving right along, in a very balanced, reasonable way, point out his most recent or flagrant infraction, or the one most relevant to the conversation at hand, in a way which makes it absolutely unmistakable that your adversary broke the rules. You may do this in the form of a series of questions: Am I correct that our By-Laws do not allow this? Then, am I correct in concluding there was no authority to do this? Then, should I interpret this to mean his action was wholly out of line?

Generally, there is no need to push it to the next step, which might be some kind of rebuke, because you will have caught the culprit off guard; since no one is in an uproar, very likely no one will jump in to defend him, and the fact of being held accountable, along with some momentary embarassment of something which was supposed to intimidate you behind the scenes being played out in public, will be enough to discourage a repeat.

Pick Them Off One At A Time

As military strategy has long held, if the opposition force is too large to face directly, try to make them travel through a narrow pass, so you can pick off the whole line, however long it may be, one by one, as each comes through the pass. This same strategy recently was used by seven infamous prison inmates, who recently escaped from the maximum security Connally unit in Texas, by initially waiting for their guards to go out to lunch, then overpowering them one by one, as they returned.

Meetings played out before observers, like departmental meetings or board meetings, form just such a narrow pass. Rules are in place and others to enforce them. Participants have to be called on to speak, one by one. Confront your adversary individually, or if it is a group, confront the leader, calmly, firmly and with documentation, and it is unlikely that the others will jump in to defend him. It is easy to bully in an ad hoc group. In a public meeting, where your actions are being watched and possibly recorded, it is difficult to stand up for something which is patently against the rules and already documented as such.

Consolidate Your Victory, Achieve Your Strategic Objective

Turning back your adversaries is not enough in itself. You must use your victory to propel your policies in your organization and achieve the success of its mission. It is only by forming and articulating and finally executing a vision for your organization that your career will continue to move forward, in tandem, little by little, inching toward invincibility