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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

With 30,000 species of fish identified and catalogued, you’d think some of the more exotic might belong in our growing business bestiary. You’d be right. For example:

Remoras

Remoras have a suction cup on top of their heads. But they aren’t parasites. Just freeloaders. With the suction cup they attach themselves to a convenient predator — sharks are the best-known, but hardly the only ones.

Remora

Photo by Klaus Stiefel – all rights reserved

Remoras benefit twice from this arrangement: They get a free ride, and the free ride reliably takes them to a source of food: When sharks kill prey they aren’t tidy. They leave little bits of meat floating around, which the Remora is happy to snag.

The Remoras you have to deal with are like this. Neither energetic nor particularly competent, they ride along on team activities. They don’t produce much, but they don’t get in the way, either. Their specialty is being harmless. In return they get a share of credit for their team’s success.

The problem is that their teammates have to pick up the slack. If you’re part of a seven-person team with one Remora, the rest of you either have to work 15% harder, or you have to accept that your team will be about that much less productive than any non-Remora-afflicted teams you’re compared to.

What to do when a Remora suctions onto you?

What managers can (and can’t) do

Managers can do their best, assigning tasks, making sure “completion” has a tangible definition, and reviewing at least a sample of task results to make sure everyone is at least getting something identifiable done.

But this won’t tell you whether one is a Remora who relies too much on help from teammates, especially because you want to encourage team members to ask each other for help when they’re stuck. Beyond this you also want to assign some tasks as collaborations.

Also, leaders are responsible for team dynamics, and you don’t want a team where ratting each other out to the manager is a common solution, nor do you want to fall into the trap of adjudicating these disputes.

So in the end, Remoras are a team problem. As a team member, what can you do? You can:

  • Complain to your manager, who is, after all, supposed to make sure all members of the workforce are productive.

But in addition to the ratting-out issue, there’s a good chance your manager already knows about the Remora, but isn’t willing to deal with the problem because (1) documenting the Remora’s poor performance in ways HR will accept isn’t always as easy as it sounds; and (2) the Remora is an inoffensive soul and the manager doesn’t want the guilt associated with terminating someone who isn’t, in the end, a bad human being.

  • Accept some of the extra workload, leaving the rest to marginally poorer team performance, and don’t worry about it.

There’s a lot to be said for doing nothing. It’s a stress-free alternative. Here’s how to decide whether it’s the right choice: Make a list of the five biggest problems you face every day in doing your job. If the Remora doesn’t make the list, it’s time to shrug your shoulders and get on with it.

  • Help the Remora find something productive to do. Many Remoras aren’t what they are by choice. They just aren’t very good at what they’re supposed to do and don’t have much opportunity to do what they are at least semi-competent to take on.

Figure out some tasks they can do that would help out the team, and enlist friends on your team to figure out some more. There’s almost always something, even if it’s just taking and publishing all meeting notes, manually unit-testing user-interface code other team members produce, or taking care of bits and pieces of paperwork that’s even more annoying than having a Remora on the team.

  • Ignore. Just because someone asks you for help, that doesn’t mean you have to provide it. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me thirty-seven times, shame on me.

Something to keep in mind as you decide what to do about your workplace Remoras:

Sharks ignore them.

* * *

Thanks to Ed Paquette, Paul Schaefer, and Myron Ware for suggesting and offering their descriptions of this gilly critter.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Consider the piranha.

According to Smithsonian.com, “A typical piranha diet consists of insects, fish, crustaceans, worms, carrion, seeds and other plant material. A red-bellied piranha (Pygocentrus nattereri), for example, eats about 2.46 grams per day—about one-eighth of its average body mass.”

But in our KJR Bestiary we’re embracing post-factualism. We don’t care about what piranhas really eat, and how much of it. The Piranha of our bestiary is the one the locals conned Teddy Roosevelt into believing in. The one Hollywood makes movies about. The one that, hunting in large, vicious schools, can eat a human alive in a couple of minutes.

Piranhas

Do you work with Piranhas?

I was tempted to call these colleagues ducks, as in “pecked to death by ducks,” but somehow even the most intimidating mallards just don’t seem to inspire the proper level of fear and revulsion.

So Piranhas it is — those colleagues who individually lack even the force of character to backstab their unlucky victims, but who in large groups can shred a fellow employee’s reputation and self-esteem, one small bite at a time.

Office Piranhas receive no obvious benefit from their nastiness. Benefit, though, isn’t really the point.

Unlike Howler Monkeys and quite a few other species too, Piranhas don’t see their world as a pecking order into which they have to establish their level, where the higher up they are the more benefit flows their way.

Piranhas, along with no shortage of other beasts, have a simpler ranking system: their world consists of friends and enemies, with no one in between.

The difference between Piranhas and those other friends-and-enemies beasts is the difference between I and we.

If you’re my enemy it’s singular. Whether I simply see you as someone who’s standing in my way or I see you as a bad person who must be stopped for the greater good, you’re my enemy.

Not so for Piranhas. Piranha-ism is all about group identity. So far as I can tell, Piranhas see themselves as MOS’s … Members of School, just like their aqueous namesakes.

That is, they divide the world into us and them. And if you’re them you’re the enemy, deserving everything bad we can dish out.

Piranhas also understand just how small they are compared to their enemies, which is why they hide in dark water and only attack when their prey is at its most vulnerable.

All of this is also why Piranhas prize loyalty above all other virtues. “Be true to your school” is what matters most (I couldn’t help myself). It’s a zero-sum game, which means helping anyone who isn’t an MOS is, in the end, doing us harm.

As mentioned before, Piranhas’ targets are self-esteem and reputation. Dealing with the self-esteem part isn’t at all hard. This is mostly a matter of the Piranhas trying to establish themselves as the Cool Kids Club, and all you have to do to avoid taking damage is to want, as urgently, desperately, and visibly as possible, to never be a member or to be mistaken for one.

When interacting with Piranhas at this level, eye rolls and sour smiles are, unlike the scaly ones, your friend.

The reputation part is a harder nut to crack because there’s nothing for you to sink your teeth into, unlike the Piranhas, who can sink theirs into you. That is, since no single action on the Piranhas part even rises to the hard-to-counter level of backstabbing, there’s little you can do to address each of their little nibbles.

What you can do is recognize that metaphors won’t help you solve this. As with backstabbing, your best recourse when others are trying to harm your reputation is to have a strong personal network — a wide range of associates who recognize your integrity, competence, and value, and who, on top of that, consider you to be part of their we.

Piranhas who try to overcome a barrier this strong will find themselves left high and dry.

* * *

The invitation is still open: Send me your species and join the KJR Cool Kids Club. What I’d like from you are:

  • Species: A type of bad leader or manager, associated with an unpleasant creature, whether alive, extinct, or mythical. I’ll also consider unpleasant ecosystems if you come up with a nasty organization type instead.
  • Root Cause: What you think leads to the character flaws you’re describing.
  • Solution: What, in your personal experience, works to help an employee survive unscathed and without being mutated in the process.
  • Permission: This includes permission to give you credit for the idea, if you’d like that, or instructions not to. It also includes permission to use your ideas intact, or to modify both your thoughts and your writing as I see fit. Please don’t take offense if I do. Even if I like your writing that doesn’t mean it fits KJR. And if I disagree with your thinking … well, my name will be on the final result. I’ll do my best to give proper credit without burdening your good name with my opinions.
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