Harmless when they harm – HR message from leech and vampire bat

The management principle of one being harmless to be harmful, the corporate leaders must recognize. It is not necessary that all those harmful people must harm you and the people who appear to be soft and gentle are harmless. The later group of people can be more deadly and dangerous than the former lot.

Look at leech or vampire bat for example. Both these animals are very gentle from the perspective of causing pain to us when they suck our blood. When they bite and siphon out our blood, in most instances we won’t even feel any pain. During night hours, the gory of these animals, especially the vampire bat most likely to go unnoticed due to their totally harmless approach in harming us.

When we learn about these animals, instead of thinking more about leech or vampire and become so, we must also grasp the hidden management message quickly and must audit the behavior and working style of people around us.

In corporate, we can find several leeches and vampire bats growing fat and growing rich mostly due to the unawareness of people around them. There is no point in blaming leech or vampire bat because that is how they have evolved. They will be harmless when they harm us. Therefore the management wisdom of one being harmless to be harmful, everyone must learn from nature.

Often people limit their curiosity and learning with what is visible and would often draw final conclusions. It is mostly due to laziness people limit their learning and knowledge. When people opt easy to approach and are unwilling to put any extra labor, naturally what they see however limited it may be, would assume to be final.

If the leaders ever adopt such leadership style and started to conclude/judge, imagine the consequences. Another factor also determines the above syndrome. In most corporate, the harmful people usually adopt very friendly and harmless techniques and methods than being harsh and cruel. By being harmless to appear, people can easily hide their weakness and simultaneously can also execute their designs and plans intelligently. Often such people would appear as very loyal & faithful, very obedient to the boss, engaged in sycophancy, concerned only about the organization than about anything, even own family etc. Most bosses would fall flat to sycophancy.

We need to learn the art to differentiate goodness from cunningness. By falling into the trap of ‘goodness’ we should not fail to differentiate cunningness of people and similarly, by falling into the trap of ‘cunningness’ we also should not conclude goodness of people differently.

What is apparently appears to be harmless and visibly harmful people both can be harmless as well as harmful is the management message nature conveys to us.

Dr S Ranganathan