People who develop and maintain professional relationships only to serve their own needs and purposes don’t fool anyone for very long.
By prioritizing personal benefits over personal attachments and emotions, these utilitarian mercenaries don’t develop authentic or rich relationships with others.
Instead, their relationships remain shallow, underdeveloped, and transactional.
Because there is a social stigma attached to being self-interested and calculating in relationships, utilitarians often go to great lengths to mask their attitudes.
They have learned to pretend to care about others while they secretly focus only on their own desired outcomes. In reality, sacrificing for the benefit of others or investing in long-term loyalty never occurs to them.
Over time, people sniff out the fraud of utilitarians, many of whom can’t admit, even to themselves, that their self-interest drives everything they do in relationships.
This doesn’t make them bad people or inferior in how they perform their work. But it does undermine the trust others place in them and the depth of their relationships. Those around them come to suspect that they have a personal agenda in whatever they do or advocate for.
If you have a colleague who operates from a utilitarian approach, you know how disappointing their attitude and poor attempt to mask it can be. The more you care about people and relationships, the harder it is to accept this attitude.
To make matters worse, when these self-interested parties are largely compensation or reward-oriented, their actions can become obnoxious to others. Their “coin-operated” mentality makes everything they do about what they can get paid. This destroys the goodwill others need to support, help, and collaborate with them.
Utilitarianism in professional relationships seems perfectly logical to them. Other people possess the resources they need to succeed, such as advocating for their ideas, purchasing their products and services, or sharing the information they need to complete their work.
So naturally, they do what they need to in order to achieve their end goals. By acting as if the relationship matters but instead focusing on how to attain the benefits they seek, they prove to people that they are uninterested in developing a more meaningful relationship.
As a result, others treat their requests with skepticism and often view them as demanding, detached, and lacking any empathy.
Because their relationships remain transactional in nature, this causes others to withhold their emotional investment and interest. Interestingly, if the lack of genuine emotional connection and spontaneity in their relationships is pointed out, utilitarians are often surprised by the criticism.
The world view of a utilitarian is typically so strong as to prohibit them from seeing how they or anyone else would engage differently.
If you have a colleague with this self-serving attitude, it is unlikely that you can do anything to change it. What you can do is try to find mutual benefits that work for all parties.
Understanding who they are and why can ease the tensions and dissatisfaction you might experience with them. Remind yourself that, if nothing else, utilitarians are highly practical and willing to negotiate what others need when they receive what they want.
Ironically, the only way to deal effectively with a utilitarian is to act in kind.
