The good-cop-bad-cop tactic is not obvious to juniors. Teach them the roles, and take on the bad-cop role for them to succeed.

When I was young, I often heard from older colleagues: “You need to have more experience to understand this.”

I hated it. What a stupid way to say “shut up.” What a stupid way to teach the next generation.

Now in my mid-forties, with a substantial amount of professional experience, I often work with junior colleagues. I pay close attention to never saying the E-word to my junior colleagues. I do this in my role as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, but also in my role as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, where I command a battalion.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not trying to teach the following generation of professionals.

In this article, let’s look at a very specific example: good-cop-bad-cop tactics. This is one of the most powerful tactics in leadership, yet young people need a good coach to learn it.

Why Bother?

Why did I choose the good-cop-bad-cop tactic as an example? It’s for two reasons: First, it’s not self-evident to junior colleagues. As most junior colleagues have never worked with senior people before, their solution space only includes their own capabilities. You can’t blame them; it’s not their fault that they are young. But you can show them what solutions exist beyond their experience.

Second, it always works. No matter if you need to secure a proposal from a second supplier for a new firewall or if you try to sell your company, the tactic always works.

Teach It

A baby would never start eating with a spoon without being taught. Naturally, babies eat with their hands.

Similarly, why would a young professional naturally employ the good-cop-bad-cop tactic? Here are two examples of why you must teach the tactic.

In the first example, a young colleague approaches you, visibly agitated. No matter if he or she had a dispute with a customer, was blocked by a supplier’s inactivity, or fundamentally disagreed with a colleague from a different department, he or she is locked in the bad-cop role. That’s because of the emotions and the agitation. And when young colleagues are locked in emotion and agitation, they miss an important point: Usually, it’s the young colleagues who interact daily with customers, suppliers, and colleagues from different departments. You can’t be the bad cop if you need to interact regularly with other people. The bad cop should be the senior colleague.

The second example is about inactivity. How many times have you witnessed a young colleague saying, “I’ve sent a reminder email to them, but I’m not getting any replies.” Unfortunately, that’s a common problem. Junior colleagues are often ignored by customers and suppliers — their email signatures give away their position in the organization. In such a scenario, the tactic works like this: Tell your junior colleague to write to the customer or supplier again, saying that they need a reply for their senior leadership, and put senior leadership (i.e., yourself) in cc. This even works in small organizations where hierarchies are flat — people always want to talk to the top dog. Too bad when they don’t realize that the top dog plays the bad-cop part.

Brief It

So far, we’ve been talking about situations of daily life. However, good-cop-bad-cop is a tactic originally intended for negotiations. When two representatives of your organization go into a negotiation, you can play the roles in real-time.

As in everyday situations, the junior colleague mostly takes on the good-cop role, while the senior person plays the bad cop. Depending on how badly the senior colleague needs to behave to achieve the desired negotiation result, you need to brief your junior colleague on what’s going to happen. If they don’t know how you will behave in your bad-guy role, they might feel intimidated or surprised — remember junior colleagues’ limited working experience with senior leadership.

Conclusion

Isn’t the good-cop-bad-cop tactic a nice example of why it pays off for junior colleagues to go to the office and interact with more senior colleagues? You don’t learn from senior colleagues in your home office and in video calls.

And what’s in it for senior leadership? If you stop employing and teaching junior colleagues, there won’t be anybody around to play the bad-guy role when you retire.