One Word Tells You Who Will Fight for You. And Who Won't.

Early in my career, I assumed that figuring out who to trust at work was a long game - years of observation, accumulated evidence, slow pattern-matching. Thirty years inside large software companies - Adobe, Autodesk, Activision, and others - taught me something more efficient. People tell you who they are constantly, in small ways, if you know what to listen for.

The most reliable signal I ever found fits in a single word.

“They.”

“They want us to do this.” “They are very interested in this deadline.” “They established the process.” Every organization has its version of this sentence, and everyone reading this has heard it - probably this month or even yesterday.

The question worth asking is never really who “they” are. Senior management? Some power behind the curtain? The question worth asking is why the speaker reached for that word instead of a name - including their own.

Because in my experience, “they” almost always translates to the same thing: I do not want to own this.

“They” is not “I.” And once you register that distinction, it stops being a figure of speech. It becomes a window into how a person operates and, more critically, how they will operate when something important of yours is at stake.

The upgraded version

At one company where I worked, the pattern evolved into something more sophisticated. The anonymous “they” acquired a name and not just any name. The CEO's.

“John wants us to do this” was the ultimate conversation stopper. (For legal purposes: John is not his real name.)

Think about the mechanics for a moment. In a company of thousands, no ordinary employee can walk over and verify what the CEO actually wants. The claim is unfalsifiable by design. Which made it devastatingly effective and because it was effective, it spread. Within a few years it was simply how debates ended in that organization.

The result was an environment where decisions happened constantly, and nobody owned any of them.

I sometimes wondered whether John had any idea how many things he allegedly wanted. He retired years ago, so I will never know. My honest guess: he would have been astonished.

Where the word costs you money

You can hear “they” anywhere. Where it deserves your full attention is in conversations about your own future - performance reviews, promotions, compensation.

Ask your manager why this year's bonus came in lower than expected, and there is a decent chance you will hear some version of: “They decide the allocation. They have this rule. They figured out who gets what.”

Here is the thing - it might even be true. Your manager may genuinely have no say in these decisions.

But in every company I have ever worked for, large or small, these rules come with built-in flexibility. Deliberately. Exceptions exist because someone can always go up the chain and make a case. Sometimes the case wins, sometimes it loses but it can always be made.

Which means the person hiding behind “they” has already made one decision entirely on their own: that the someone making your case is not going to be them.

The time I went looking

I know the alternative exists because I once had to use it.

A promotion I expected was denied. The explanation came wrapped in the usual anonymous packaging and instead of accepting it, I started asking who, specifically, had said "no". It took some digging. But “they” turned out to have a name and a title: my second-level skip manager.

What I did next was not comfortable. I asked him for a standing one-on-one - coach me, tell me what was missing, let me earn it in the next cycle. I fully expected him to decline. Skip-level managers do not typically take on coaching projects two layers down.

He said yes. Six months later, I had the promotion.

The lesson I took from it was not about persistence. It was structural: there is always a person making the decision. Not a committee, not a process, not a “they” - just one person, findable with effort, because a company is a hierarchy and hierarchies concentrate decisions by design. The anonymity is a costume the decision wears, not a fact about how it was made.

What to do with this

So someone in a conversation about your future reaches for “they,” or for the name of an executive you could never realistically reach. What have you actually learned?

You have learned that this person will not have your back when it matters. They will not fight for you in the room you are not in. That is not an accusation; plenty of decent people operate this way out of habit or self-protection. But it is information, and it is remarkably reliable information.

You will not change them and confronting them directly rarely ends well. What you can do is stop outsourcing your hopes to them. Find out who actually holds the decision. Engage that person if you can. The worst case is that you tried and lost, which is still better than the false comfort of assuming someone else was ever going to do it for you.

Small language patterns send big signals. Learning to read them is the Hidden Game: hearing not just what people say, but what their words tell you about how they will behave when something important is at stake.

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This is the written version of Episode 1 of The Hidden Game — real stories from thirty years inside large software enterprises, and what they reveal about how these places actually work. The full episode is on YouTube. And if you are hearing a lot of “they” in your organization — or dealing with any other signal that does not feel right — there is a free discovery call. A real conversation, not a pitch.