The story of the managers who want to become rats

A new plague has struck organizations; one so fantastic that it could have come out of Hollywood. Do you know those movies, in which you see perfectly decent people having ordinary lives and later show themselves as either zombies or aliens, devouring the innocent? Maybe the persons who write those stories have a history in organizations.

In 2003, a book came out in The Netherlands about how to become a rat. In the mean time, there are also workshops given on that subject and apparently they are fully booked. Turning people into rats is becoming big business (the book is translated in eight languages). The book and the workshops give people a bleak picture of organizational life. It points out that playing along in the organization only makes you a loser, while those who know how to play games will win. Doing a decent job is not enough; you have to do it, well or poorly, in such a way that your interests are protected. You do not do that by believing the language that is en vogue within the organization, where, according to the rat, a coach is not hired to make you perform better, but to harass you and where teamwork means that you will have to work with people whose resources you can steel (“if you don’t do it, someone else will”).

The sad thing is that the rat people have a point. Who of us has not met a manager who always claims to be a “people person”, but apparently never has time to listen to your concerns? Do you believe him the next time that he claims to be a people person or do you “work around him”? Who of us has not heard to be on the team, only later to learn that the staffing of the team had already been decided and you are not included? Who of us has not been very careful with travel expenses, while the top managers apparently can only have an off site if it is a five star accommodation? How do you respond to all that? Maybe by becoming a rat (“better a rat than a sheep”, is what you might think).

What are the consequences for the organization? For starters, integrity goes out of the window (if you think integrity is a luxury, take the trouble of checking this with one or two of your clients). Next, quality suffers in many respects, both the quality of the product or service as well as the quality of the processes within the organization. Employees have become less dependable, because some of them have chosen to be. And think of the clients. I have seen several times that within a company people were not aware of a problem, while their clients did see it and acted on that. In an age of increasing competition you may want to prevent that, or, better yet, turn this around into a competitive advantage.

Despite research that indicates that the majority of employees show from time to time some type of rat-like behavior, I do not think we should overstate the issue. Presumably, most people do not willingly choose to act in a rat-like manner. They find themselves in situations in which shortcuts, self-interests and “political behavior” appear to them the best option. There may be a minority of people who really seek to betray their clients, peers and company, acting in an unconscionable manner and going to workshops where they can perfect this type of behavior. But most rat-like people probably just act like that out of frustration and disillusion; in short, they had hoped things to be different Still, their behavior poses a problem.

What to do about all this? There are no universal solutions, but a few points can be mentioned. For one, be very aware of behavior at the top. Research has indicated that more often than not the people who feel justified being rats point to the top by way of excuse. Also, it is very possible that the rat-like behavior is only a symptom and not the real issue. The real issue could be that delayering and empowerment have gone too fast or superficially. If that happens, the result can be that individual employees feel more pressure and more freedom, while it is not clear enough to them what to do with that freedom. That might encourage some to “do their own things”, while others could become frustrated from the felt lack of guidance and start acting from that frustration. If that is the case, it is probably wise to improve the team spirit and clarify that objectives and individual roles and responsibilities. Would you call a pack of rats a team? Probably not. If people in your company show rat-like behavior, it just might be a good thing to work on the team-mentality, starting with the behavior from which you set that in motion.
Joop Remmé
www.knowdialogue.nl