Of Bad Guys at Work and Their Guerrilla Warfare

Have you ever read a book having a strong villain and wondered how such evil people live with themselves, or watched a movie with the antagonist coming down heavily on the main character? Think about Edi Gathegi at his worst! Does it ever leave you wondering if ever such bad people exist in real life??

Here is the news, we have antagonists at work and they are always taking new forms and shapes in their role of bringing other people down. You may not notice them immediately because some of them have perfected the art of camouflage, but they exist in all spectrums of society.?

Remember the day you did a good proposal and shared it with your colleagues for peer review and they gave it a thumbs up? The day you present it, however, to the bigger team, these same colleagues who had seen the proposal and maybe even contributed to it, suddenly become wiser and decide to play ‘devil’s advocates’ and poke holes into the proposal, making it look like all you did was rubbish. Rings a bell?

Turns out that by you sharing your work in advance, you were only giving them a chance to prepare a good case against it. And since you did not expect this from them, you will seldom have a comeback, especially when the person you thought was your friend and would support you, becomes the gang leader, agitating for those opposing you.

“It was nothing personal, just business,” they will tell you afterward in a lazy attempt to get away with it or one may say, “We only want to finetune your idea to make it sharper. As it is now, it is all over the place!” Really? Why was it not all over the place before it was presented to an audience?

In every team, we have people who are not very good at their jobs but are always quick to point out mistakes in what others do. This type is always particular about the kind of employees they attack. They go for those known to be good, fault their work and in the process look smart.

It is a genius move. Look at it from a combat point of view. If you want to be the strongest in a group, do not waste time,?fighting your way up, beating the weakest to the strongest. Power is not won organically like that. Instead, skip the process, go right to the top, and pick a fight with the strongest. If you beat that one, you automatically become number one. Should you put up a good fight and lose, you are likely to be number two.

In essence, antagonists work round the clock to make your life miserable. That is what they think they do when they oppose everything and fight any new initiative at work.

On the contrary, in literature and theatre, when they do the plot, the author or movie producer seldom looks at the antagonist as a bad person but rather as a tool to help develop the main character and move the story forward. Without the antagonist, the movie would be boring, as a matter of fact, even in monologues, we always have the antagonist’s voice. Antagonists exist to test your limits.

We have a good example of Jesus Christ when he went to the wilderness to fast and pray for forty days. Being in his most vulnerable state, Satan appeared, disguised as an angel sent by God, and tempted him to break the fast, use his powers to turn stones into bread, and end his hunger. He even enticed him with great wealth but none of it worked. Through that, we are able to see the strength of Christ which goes on to inspire his followers for generations, more than 2,000 years on.

At the workplace, however, the bad guy concept is on another new and evolving level. Fuelled by intense cut-throat competition and jostling for positions, the workplace has grown to become a battleground with arrows and missiles flying from every direction.

It would not be so much of a problem if you could already see the person careering the missiles your way for when you have the weapon and combatant in sight, it is easy to counter them. This is never the case. We are today masters of guerrilla warfare.

An example of an antagonist at work is your typical bully. Unlike things like outright violence and even sexual harassment which have been defined in great detail, bullying at work is still a grey area. In some instances, it goes without being called out.

There is the kind of bullying that is laced and served as jokes and jargon. You will need to refer to a dictionary to discover that being uniquely obtuse is not a compliment. The same applies to the jokes that are today gushed out in unmeasured doses.

Off-color jokes have become too common at work, some of them being used as a form of icebreaker to lighten up the room before people get down to the real work. In most cases, however, such insensitive jokes are used deliberately to put others down and make them feel inferior.

Other than bullying, the other forms of antagonists at work will be things like mind games. Mind games may include rudimentary behavior like silent treatment or as extreme as telling open lies to off-put a colleague and keep them chasing mirages and keep them off one’s path.

When all is said and done, conflict is part and parcel of life. For those in the know, growth happens in an environment of conflict and discord. Easy come easy go. Same as in bodybuilding, your muscles grow only out of resistance to the weight.

To flourish, therefore, the same way a flower withstands the heavy rains and high temperatures, we must find a way of feeding off the negativity, bullies, hate, mind games, and anything the antagonists throw at us and use it to our advantage. As the saying goes, only the tree that bears the sweetest fruits gets the maximum number of stones.

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