Make them compete for your approval.
Versailles, chapter 185, is the definitive implementation. Louis XIV made access to his person the only currency of prestige at court, divided the ritual of his rising and retiring into stages with defined entry rights, and assigned specific acts — holding the candlestick, handing over the shirt — as distinctions.
Norbert Elias's analysis in The Court Society is the theoretical account, and its central observation is that the system domesticated a warrior aristocracy without a single battle. Nobles who had raised armies against the crown within living memory spent their lives competing over precedence at a ceremony that had no function.
Two mechanisms.
Festinger's social comparison theory holds that in the absence of objective standards people evaluate themselves against others. Remove any external measure of a courtier's worth — no independent estate power, no military command, no office that does not derive from the king — and the only available measure is rank relative to peers, which is administered by one person.
And the distribution is variable-ratio. Favor arrives unpredictably, so no strategy reliably secures it, and the correct behavior is therefore constant presence and constant attention. This is chapter 284's schedule applied to status.
The consequence Louis wanted was not obedience but redirection. Competitive energy that would otherwise have been aimed at the crown is aimed sideways, at rivals, and a man consumed by whether he outranks his cousin is not organizing anything.
The modern forms are recognizable. Ranked leaderboards in sales organizations. Forced distribution performance ratings. Tiered membership levels. Access to the founder as a reward. Bonus pools whose criteria are undisclosed. In each case, the structure converts colleagues into rivals, and rivals do not combine.
The boundary is that engineered rivalry has predictable second-order costs and they fall on the organization. Forced ranking has been abandoned by most of the large firms that adopted it, because it destroys information sharing, punishes cooperation, and drives out people who could have been developed. Applied inside a family — playing children off against each other for approval — it is a recognized pattern in the clinical literature on narcissistic family systems.
The counter is chapter 290's mirror: decline to compete on a dimension somebody else controls.
Countered by The Charming Colleague