During my ten or so years in the corporate world I had the distinctive pleasure of observing and occasionally meeting some fantastic creatures. Being part of IT companies it would be very easy to single out the “geek” persona. These and other corporate characters (suck-ups, rebels, smellers) you already know pretty well. I’m going to direct your attention to other types you might already know, but didn’t quite figure out how to name, let alone understand their behavior. Hopefully my musings here will help you deal with these creatures when you next encounter them.
Corporate Copycats
Suck-ups are a dime a dozen in any company. It’s safe to say wherever there’s a boss, someone’s face is attached to his ass. The copycat is a different creature. You might say copycats are enhanced versions of suck-ups. Their utmost desire is to become a person other than themselves, so they pick their target (usually his / her boss or a member of upper management) and basically copy their behavior to the extent of their possibilities.
I’ve come across these creatures in more than one occasion. They not only back-up whatever their bosses say, no matter how stupid or unreasonable it might be, they usually adopt it with a passion and blind eagerness to obey more suited to the military than to a business environment.
It is a very dangerous thing to follow rules without thinking, that’s why copycats are potentially dangerous individuals. In case you encounter one and you happen to disagree on a particular subject, be mindful that since copycats have no mind of their own their mind cannot be changed. You will never succeed unless you manage to convince their object of desire (i.e. the person they emulate) of changing his mind instead. This strategy could mean jumping the chain of command, so it must be used wisely.
The Un-feedback-able
I’ve spent half of my professional life as a manager, and as such delivering periodical feedback has always been one of my duties. In all of my teams without exception there has always been a person that no matter how much I tried to explain things to, would always wind up not listening or not caring and ultimately doing whatever they wanted to. Also, they would rebut every single piece of negative feedback, finding a very reasonable justification for every single thing you dare consider a flaw in their performance. These are the un-feedback-able.
Coincidentally or not, in my teams, these were always brilliant people with authority issues and stubborn to the bone. I remember dreading the moment in which I had to deliver them feedback and in more than one occasion I would purposely schedule the appointment at the end of the day because I knew my mind would not be good for much after it.
Finally (after a few years) I came up with the formula to deal with the un-feedback-able: pulling rank. If you know me or have read my previous post on management you’ll know that I discourage this type of method unless necessary. This is one such occasion.
I found that time and brain cells could be saved by using phrases such as: “I can see you are not in agreement with my position, but I’m your manager and I will be evaluating you according to what I just told you.”
Sadly, most times they carried on doing exactly what they wanted to, but at least, if on their next evaluation I had to shave points off their final score I could do so without so much as an “I told you to do things in a different way”.
Showoffs
In a recent comment to one of my posts, one of you inspired the species I’m about to describe. The comment described those developers that just can’t do something in a straightforward fashion and wind up unnecessarily complicating things in order to prove to others their vast knowledge. These are the tech showoffs you can find in almost all development teams.
The behavior of these creatures is clearly derived of insecurity. Not long ago men resorted to their cars to make up for their shortcomings elsewhere. Later, cars were replaced (or accompanied) by gadgets such as laptop computers, cell phones or smart-phones. Nowadays, for developers, penis size can be measured by the amount of unnecessary frameworks they are able to pile up in order to create a single “Hello World” application.
It doesn’t matter if something that could be done in fifteen minutes took five months to build, or that it has the hardware requirements of an electric power plant; showing off to your peers justifies almost anything.
When confronted with one of these creatures you need to know this is almost always a sin of youth and will eventually fade away. Anything you can do to speed up the learning process could help, but remember no matter how much you try to teach life experience, there is nothing like experiencing by one-self. Working a five-day rush will teach any showoff that sometimes a smart architectural or design choice will pay off big at a later stage.
Self Promoter 2.0
I know self promoters are no novelty, but social networking has helped engineer a completely new breed of this fascinating species. They don’t just brag about their accomplishments (whether real or invented) in office halls anymore. They have expanded their domain and now spend most of their time building their 2.0 personas to be the very reflection of the perfect professional, something of course they could accomplish by doing some actual work once in a while, but… why bother?
This creature is cunning, let’s face it, there is no way a person with no smarts can pull this off. However, they tend to build as much enemies as fans, since subordinates or peers of these individuals often feel social self promoters are full of it and take credit when they don’t deserve it or just plain don’t do the job they are supposed to and more work falls on their laps.
I have yet to figure out a way of dealing with social self promoters. I can’t say I have had direct interaction with any of them, but I keep hearing about them from acquaintances. Boy, do they sound pissed off. I eagerly await to see what happens when one of these individuals falls from grace. I believe that given their exposure they could immediately become pariahs. The bigger they are…
Flavor Combination
Any one person could simultaneously be more than one of the creatures described above. Surely a showoff has some traits of an un-feedback-able individual, and a traditional suck-up or self promoter could easily have the characteristics of both a copycat or a social self-promoter.
If you see a person that combines the four, please send a picture to both me and National Geographic. You could have an amazing discovery on your hands.
Shuje
On my next post I will explain why you should not feed developers after midnight. In the meantime, I would very much like to hear about the fauna in your workplace. Any creatures I should know of? Comment below or e-mail me at shuje@holoom.com
SO true.
I would add the type “Workaholic victim”: the one staying in the office one friday night, till late hours, repairing other’s mistakes… all this to be discussed every day of the following week, with tears of anger in between, and complaining about why no one cares about “the TEAM”.
Sounds like you have a bone to pick with someone. And if you are the constant “victim”… try to figure out how much of this is your fault.
Ah, brilliant. The 2.0 description rocks! Twi[s]t and shout sucks!
You like to mix Beatles with Twitter? Check this out:
http://www.esarcasm.com/6245/across-the-twitterverse/
Very nice identikits… I could almost match most of the creatures I’ve met so far.
I would add these two species:
* Re-outsourcers: which I describe as those who have never grabbed the hammer and always ask someone else to do it. Never expect a tangible and clear piece of work from them. In the improvable event of receiving feedback from them, it will be full of blur vocab.
So… try to avoid these people and directly recruit the ones that like being in the battle field, even if that involves avoiding the chain of command.
* Corporate Vedetes: I particularly enjoy these people. They just love all lights being focused on them, hearing their names everywhere, being copied in every useless thread and obviously, generating endless email discussions with big red flags, words like “URGENT” or “IMPORTANT” and where the “to” can be summarized as “everyone_above_me@company.com”.
My tip is to enjoy these guys, in the end it’s like dealing with a gossip TV program.
So true. I would call the first one “Problem Forwarders”, I don’t know what those people would do without the forward button in their mail clients. The second type is the “diva” variant of the traditional self-promoter.
Excellent review. Meanwhile I was reading the description, names came to my mind. I don’t understand the need of the Copycats to just play the Smithers Role.
Another interesting question would be: Why bosses of these people tend to encourage this behavior? It’s not educational and actually harmful for the company or group.
I think that, in the process of becoming a boss, some people tend to have less time for certain things and just get tired of criticism or bad news. Therefore, a person that always inflates their ego or tell them that everything is alright, is the type of person that they would rather have around.
Think of it this way: is a boss a good boss if they are surrounded by suck-ups?
This is excellent post. However I think its true at the places with well defined hierarchy. If you look at small companies, you will find plenty of other species as well
Good point. For most of these creatures to blossom you need a politicized environment.
Shuje …
Very interesting !!!
In India, there’s a language called Bengali – which happens to be my mother tongue.
In a Bengali dialect ‘holoom’ means ‘i have become’ …
Holoom therefroe is quite an appropriate name for all the ‘becomings’ you have listed
Thanks Komal. It’s nice to know that holoom has an actual meaning somewhere. We came up with it by combining the greek word holos (whole) with loom (weaving machine). Also it’s good to know it does not mean “To go crazy and kill everyone”.
Popular subject you are into my friend! I can resist enlarging your list: forwarders, event front liners and more positve…superheroes. Funny that none of them seems to be under the risk of dissapearing: Darwin does not apply to IT enviroment?
Juancho, Darwin applies. Without the original suckup, there could not be a copycat. Sadly, I don’t think they will evolve themselves into extinction. Good suggestions, I might do a follow up based on all the input I received.
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