Warp and Weft: The Hanseatic Model of Office Politics

When legendary football manager Ron Atkinson's career collapsed in 2004 after he made a racist remark about Chelsea's Marcel Desailly, the headlines were damning. He resigned from broadcasting, his newspaper column ended, and his reputation seemed beyond repair. Yet some black players who had worked under him - including Cyrille Regis and Carlton Palmer - disagreed. They were clear that the remark itself was racist. But they insisted that the man they had known and worked with was not. To them, the years of trust and support outweighed a single, terrible lapse. They were defending character as they had experienced it, not the words that had been spoken.

This tension between single moments and sustained character plays out in workplaces constantly. I once watched a well-liked, long-tenured manager survive what should have been a career-ending mistake - an inappropriate sexualised joke that led to a formal investigation. This was someone known as an all-round good person: respectful in his dealings, genuinely invested in others' development. When the investigation concluded against him, colleagues went out of their way to support him, even when it clashed with their desire for a quiet life and management's appetite for clean moral signalling. They insisted that one misjudgement should not erase years of decent behaviour.

Contrast that with the self-described "old-school operator" I encountered elsewhere: feared, blunt, and proud of it. The day he faltered - when a strategic project hit the rocks - his team did nothing. They did not hate him enough to sabotage him. They simply withheld help.

This is the difference between power extracted by fear and power granted through respect. The first can deliver results. The second saves you when those results turn against you.

History captures this divide with brutal clarity. In the Peloponnesian War, Athens demanded that the small neutral island of Melos surrender. When the Melians appealed to fairness, the Athenians replied: "The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must." They crushed the island - killing the men and enslaving the women. Thucydides recorded this exchange not as an endorsement of might-makes-right, but as a warning. He understood that such naked displays of power poison future relationships. For a time, Athens looked unstoppable. But the harshness bred enemies, not friends. When Persia began funding a Spartan fleet and former allies remembered the brutality they had witnessed, Athens found itself increasingly isolated. The final reckoning came eleven years later at Aegospotami, where Athens's naval power was destroyed. In those desperate final months, as blockade starved the city, Athens discovered that power built on fear crumbles the moment that fear lifts.

Across northern Europe, a different model emerged centuries later. The Hanseatic League was a network of trading cities - Lübeck, Hamburg, Riga, Danzig and many more - banded together to protect their merchants. It was not merely a mutual-defence pact, though it had teeth. It was shared warehouses, common trading standards, privileges in foreign ports, and a shared identity that transcended local borders. It worked like the warp and weft of fabric: weaving cities together until betraying one meant wounding yourself. When faced with hostile rivals, the League's instinct was not to crush them but to bind them in - offering trading privileges, shared protections, mutual benefits until former enemies became stakeholders. Through repeated acts of reciprocity, they turned potential threats into partners. Like Kevlar under impact, that fabric grew stronger when tested and made the league endure for centuries.

The office parallel runs deeper than it first appears. The colleague who quietly invests in reciprocity - sharing credit, protecting others in difficult moments, bringing potential rivals into initiatives rather than freezing them out, ensuring that projects serve others' aims as well as their own - builds something more durable than authority. When they stumble, people rally. Not to excuse their mistakes, but to insist that one misjudgement should not erase a longer pattern of conduct.

The Atkinson affair reveals the uncomfortable complexity of this. Nobody defended the remark - they could not and should not have done. What his former players defended was the man: the years of investing in black talent, the fair dealing and respect they had experienced firsthand. That distinction is messy, but it is real. In offices, as in sport or statecraft, people do not judge in single snapshots. They judge on the fabric of time.

And that is the choice every professional faces. You can rule by fear, Athens-style, and gain quick obedience but few allies. Or you can build fabric, Hanseatic-style - slower, less glamorous, but infinitely more durable. Fear collapses at the moment of weakness. Fabric holds because its fibres interlock.