What does Five of Swords mean for career and work?

Office politics, a win that alienates the team, a colleague undermined.

The reputational cost is the substance. Somebody who wins internal fights consistently acquires a reputation that outlasts the fights, and it follows them past the point where anybody remembers what the arguments were about.

The practical reading is that the position is now less strong than it looks, because it was taken in a way that removed the people who would have defended it.

Conflict won at too high a price. Hollow victory, hostility, somebody walking away.

Ask what you are actually trying to achieve, because it is probably not this. The card is not against conflict and does not counsel avoidance; it is against a particular way of finishing one.

In an advice position it asks what you will have when you have won, which is a question that answers itself in most of the situations this card describes.

Making amends, or refusing to. Ongoing resentment carried by everybody involved.

The best possible outcome the card offers is in the reversal: walking away from a fight you could win. The tradition rates that highly and is realistic that it is rare, because the winning is genuinely available and declining it feels like losing.

Also read for an apology that arrives late and matters anyway.

Upright: hollow victory, conflict, hostility, winning badly, alienation

Reversed: making amends, resentment, walking away, reconciliation

• If I win this argument, what do I actually have?
• What am I defending: the position, or my need to hold it?