Flying Monkeys

One-liner: A colleague with a bottomless need for approval becomes someone else’s weapon, exploited themselves, and aimed at you.

Also known as / related terms: Abuse by proxy; susceptible followers / conformers (Padilla, Hogan & Kaiser); “lost souls” (Thoroughgood et al.); pawns (Babiak & Hare); narcissistic enablers.

What it is

They believe they’re being loyal. Or fair. Or just telling the truth.

A flying monkey is someone recruited, usually without recognizing it, to carry a toxic actor’s hostility toward a third party: relaying complaints, cooling toward a target, monitoring and reporting back, excluding someone from a conversation, all on another person’s behalf rather than out of any grievance of their own. The term is borrowed from the winged servants in The Wizard of Oz and comes out of narcissistic-abuse recovery writing rather than a clinical textbook. Licensed clinicians use it in popular writing: Kaytee Gillis, LCSW, interviewed a self-described former flying monkey for Psychology Today, and linguist Karen Stollznow, PhD, uses the same term in her Psychology Today column on the language of manipulation, but it carries no formal diagnostic status.

The mechanism underneath it does. Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser’s 2007 “toxic triangle” model argues that destructive leadership always requires a third ingredient beyond the leader and a permissive environment: susceptible followers. They split susceptibility into two distinct types. Colluders participate for ambition, status, or a shared worldview; they know which side they are on and what they are getting from it. Conformers comply passively, driven by unmet basic needs, low self-esteem, and a hunger to feel safe or to belong. A 2012 follow-up by Thoroughgood, Padilla, Hunter, and Tate split both categories further. Conformers divide into lost souls (unmet needs and low self-worth, looking to a strong figure for the meaning and belonging they are missing elsewhere), bystanders, and authoritarians; colluders divide into opportunists and acolytes. A flying monkey is, almost always, a lost soul, not a colluder of either kind. That is the real distinction underneath a phrase this site otherwise reserves for a knowing, self-interested ally: a colluder knows the arrangement and profits from it; a conformer does not fully see the arrangement at all.

The same 2012 taxonomy also names the flying monkey’s usual audience: bystanders, who never carry a message or cool toward anyone on cue, but who watch the pattern happen and never object, out of fear or plain indifference. A relayed “concern” only lands because a room full of bystanders lets it stand unchallenged. They aren’t neutral: the paper treats them as their own follower type in the same destructive-leadership triangle, just a quieter one.

The payment works precisely because it is aimed at the need. A raise or a title would not buy this behavior from most people. Being finally, consistently approved of, included, needed, might.

What it looks like (workplace)

Before: A colleague who has always worked hard for very little recognition, unremarkable, well-liked in a quiet way, with no history of friction with anyone on the team.

The incident: Within weeks of a manager’s new attention, they become that manager’s confidant. They start relaying “concerns” about a specific teammate, growing noticeably cooler toward that person, repeating the manager’s own phrasing almost word for word. They have no personal history of conflict with the person they are now undermining.

The month after: They visibly overextend themselves for the manager’s approval, and would be genuinely hurt, not defensive, if you suggested they were doing anything to anyone. The hostility isn’t theirs. It only passes through them.

How it actually unfolds

Four parties are doing distinct work here: the operator running the campaign, the instrument (the flying monkey) carrying it, the target it lands on, and the bystanders who let it stand. Each stage below costs the target something and, less visibly, costs the instrument something too.

1. Selection. Selection isn’t random: therapist Annie Wright, LMFT, citing practitioner research by Sandra Brown, describes operators favoring people who are empathic, socially connected, and driven to be helpful, precisely the traits that make someone easy to recruit and hard to suspect. Babiak and Hare’s corporate-psychopath research describes the same moment from the operator’s side, in workplace-instrumental terms: a pawn is being cultivated, long before they’re used. Cost so far: nothing yet, to either party, which is exactly why this stage is invisible while it’s happening.
2. The feeling, not the mission. Recruitment itself rarely arrives as a request. Wright describes the operator instead handing the recruit a feeling, usually concern, sometimes protectiveness, occasionally outrage, and letting them volunteer for the rest. The groomed account is rarely pure fabrication either: Stollznow notes the operator typically salts real, private information in among the exaggerations, which is exactly what lets the story survive a skeptical listener’s first check. Cost to the target: their reputation is already being shaped before they know a conversation about them exists. Cost to the instrument: a real, older need for approval or belonging is being answered with a counterfeit, not met.
3. First carries. The recruit starts relaying “concerns,” cooling toward the target, echoing the operator’s own phrasing closely enough that it’s barely their own account anymore, the mechanic this guide’s Triangulation entry covers directly: the message about the target reaches other people, and eventually a manager, before it ever reaches the target themselves. Cost to the target: the first real damage, someone is now cooling toward them for a reason that was never actually theirs. Cost to the instrument: the first compromise of their own integrity, one that, per the operator’s framing, doesn’t feel like a compromise from the inside.
4. Escalation. The role rarely stays where it started. Gillis’s interview with a former flying monkey traces a real escalation: relaying conversations first, then active surveillance, monitoring a former friend’s whereabouts and creating fake accounts to watch him, encouraged at one point toward a false police report, the kind of organized campaign this guide’s Coalition-Building / Mobbing and Smear Campaign entries describe from the outside. Contradictions pile up faster than the recruit can explain them away, in her own words, “the stories just didn’t add up.” Cost to the target: surveillance, active advocacy against them, sometimes formal or legal exposure. Cost to the instrument: escalating complicity in something they still don’t fully see the shape of.
5. Discard and reversal. Insight typically arrives only when the operator turns the same machinery on the instrument, once they finally pull back: Gillis’s subject describes understanding what she had put her own target through only while living through an identical smear campaign herself, and the damage to her other relationships outlasted that understanding. It’s the same pawn lifecycle Babiak and Hare describe from the operator’s side, cultivated, used, and discarded, sometimes converted into a scapegoat once they’re no longer useful, just narrated here from inside it. Cost to the target: whatever damage was already done in stages 3 and 4, often lasting. Cost to the instrument: becoming the next target, and realizing what they did to the last one only in hindsight.

Why they do it

Two separate motives are running here, and both have to hold for the pattern to work.

The operator recruits through unmet need because it is cheap and deniable. Approval costs nothing to fake, and a claim that arrives through a third party never has to be defended by the person who actually wanted it made. The Workplace Bullying Institute’s own survey data found that 55% of targets reported the bully had “encouraged people to turn against” them, recruitment is a measured, common tactic here, not an edge case.

The instrument complies because the arrangement is answering a real, older need. Someone with an unmet, childhood-rooted hunger for approval or belonging (see Basic Anxiety and the Search for Safety, where Karen Horney’s “moving toward people” strategy, winning safety through compliance and being liked, is named as the developmental root of exactly this kind of person) experiences the operator’s attention as something closer to rescue than manipulation. The operator’s framing does the rest: relaying a complaint gets described as being fair, monitoring a colleague gets described as being a team player, cooling toward someone gets described as finally seeing them clearly. None of it has to feel like an attack from the inside.

How to protect yourself

Aim at the source, not the messenger. The messenger is often the second person being used here, not the first.

• If you’re on the receiving end, respond to the operator, not the instrument. The carrier frequently has no independent grievance to argue with, and confronting them head-on usually just deepens their loyalty to whoever is telling them they’re needed.
• When you do have to respond, stick to neutral, checkable facts rather than your feelings about the operator. Anything emotional you say becomes material that can be relayed onward through the same channel.
• Trace a claim back to where it actually started before reacting to it. A complaint that arrives secondhand, from someone with no history of friction with you, is worth tracing, not just answering.
• Don’t confide in whoever has visibly become someone’s favorite right now. It isn’t personal, but it is a real information channel back to the person you’d rather not be discussing you.
• If you’re the one hearing a secondhand complaint, as a manager, HR, or a colleague asked to weigh in, there’s no formal test for telling a proxy from a genuine grievance, but a few questions help: is this firsthand or relayed, does the person raising it have their own specific history with who they’re describing, and does their phrasing echo someone else’s almost word for word. Don’t treat a calm, well-organized account as automatically more credible than a distressed one; workplace-bullying researcher David Yamada notes that genuine targets often struggle to produce a tidy, sequential narrative precisely because of what happened to them, so polish is not proof and distress is not evidence of fabrication. Being a Useful Bystander is the entry written entirely for this position.
• If you recognize yourself here: notice whether your own standing depends entirely on one person’s approval, whether you’ve started relaying, monitoring, or cooling toward people who’ve done nothing to you, and whether what you feel around your patron is closer to relief than to safety. Recognizing the role usually only happens after the operator turns on the instrument too. The way out isn’t more vigilance, it’s getting the underlying need met somewhere that doesn’t require carrying someone else’s hostility to get it.
• If you lead a team, the supply of recruitable conformers isn’t fixed. Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser’s own research ties susceptibility to unmet needs and a lack of real standing, so developing and empowering the people you manage, and keeping real oversight and checks in place, narrows the opening this pattern depends on. Approval that’s genuinely available is what makes an operator’s counterfeit version worthless.

Cross-links: Basic Anxiety and the Search for Safety, the childhood root, a “moving toward people” strategy that makes this exact recruitment possible; The Pleaser, the profile most often drafted into this role, since its own approval-seeking mechanism is the hook; Smear Campaign, which already names flying monkeys as the groomed messengers, this entry is that messenger’s own story; Corporate/Successful Psychopath, whose pawn lifecycle, cultivated, used, then discarded or scapegoated, is the operator’s-side view of the same person; Triangulation, since the instrument is the third corner, carrying a message that never comes straight; Coalition-Building / Mobbing, what a whole recruited group becomes; Divide and Conquer, kept alive by an instrument who carries one version to each side and prevents anyone from comparing notes; The Golden Child, the role’s institutionalized cousin, bought with favoritism instead of an unmet need; Being a Useful Bystander, written for the people this entry names as the audience.

Sources:

Label note: “Flying monkeys” is pop and practitioner language from narcissistic-abuse recovery writing, borrowed from the winged servants in The Wizard of Oz, used by licensed clinicians and researchers in popular writing but not a formal diagnostic term. The mechanism it names is grounded in peer-reviewed research on destructive leadership and followership (the conformer / susceptible-follower literature above) and in Babiak and Hare’s documented pawn lifecycle. The target-selection claim above (empathic, socially connected, helpfulness-driven) is reported by a licensed therapist citing practitioner research, not a peer-reviewed study itself, and should be read at that tier. This entry deliberately centers the need-driven conformer, not the self-interested colluder, which the site treats separately as a knowing collaborator.