Karma as your Business Partner

Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind, so said Juvenal.

The first time I heard of karma was in an expletive of it being the mother of a rabid dog. The idea of karma is part of the belief system of millions of people around the world. In the simplest terms, karma results from a person’s actions. Do something divisive and you will be punished with bad karma. Do something helpful, and you will reap the rewards of good karma. This concept, which has its roots and belonging in religious and academic disciplines, is now part of the mainstream consciousness of everyday life. However, it is surprisingly not found often enough in the modern workplace.

Yes, there is such a thing as office karma, and no, you can’t decide when the deserving individual receives his or her comeuppance. Early in my career in the noughties, I worked for a manager who could qualify as the devil in drag by how she took pleasure in making people’s lives miserable. However, I learnt a lot from her on how to handle office politics and bullies, and in retrospect, I’m grateful for the hard lessons I experienced while in the grasp of her merciless talons.

The long and short of the story is that she saw meteoric rises within that organization. But karma has no deadline, and the lady’s behavior finally caught up with her. She was eventually let go from the company on performance issues, and also because of the way she treated people around her. Of course her exit occurred many years after she was no longer my boss, but the bottom line is that it eventually happened, and I didn’t have to do a single thing to hasten it.

Did I get revenge? That was never my objective; never did I once think of getting one over her. I knew she was never going to change, and I figured out that any control she had over me was what I was giving her. Hence, I moved on with my life. I determined to extract my revenge by being successful and content. Problem is the gods make proud those whom they are about to destroy, and she struggled to find a place in an industry where everybody knew everybody else’s business past and present, and in her wake she left enough career corpses to ensure extreme difficulty when she found herself out on the street.

So there is a force generated by a person's actions, habits, and behaviors, whether we believe it or not. It is fortunately not based on something intangible or uncontrollable. This force exists day to day and, for all of us who spend most of our days working, we should assume that karma is our business partner with the most ingenuous way of appraising us daily. As economies across the globe continue to sputter along in various stages of recovery and many workers feel stressed, over-tasked and in need of helpful teamwork and positive attitudes in downsized office environments, karma – good and bad – is a key issue.

Of course we, being human, are biased about everything, including karma; when something negative happens to someone we like we call it ‘unfortunate’, and when it happens to someone we are not so fond of what do we call it? You got that right – karma.

In the workplace, karmas are created when we learn how to do our job. Essentially if we do a good job and work hard, we create good ‘vibe’. If all we think about at work is cutting corners, stealing from our employer in terms of breaks and exit times, we poison our own karma; it is self-inflicted. And although many people have wished bad karma on the person who took the last cup of coffee in the pot without making more, it just doesn’t work that way. Karma is a brilliant business partner and wonderful asset when you are working hard to be kind and supportive; like an emotional-spiritual annuity that pays you back daily. The best we can do is grasp every opportunity to invest in it, much as it demands great discipline in us to see action in inaction, and inaction in action.

In an interesting turn of tables in one of my past employers, there was a set of small gods on the top echelon of the organization, majority of whom took pride in harassing and lording it over everyone below them. One day there was a change in weather and a new sheriff checked into town; aware of the rot and not knowing where to start cleaning the fish, he opted to conjure a fresh slate, with one of those improper fractions of fitting 11 into 8 or something of that sort. The small gods were asked to reapply for their now-limited roles after clearance by various external vetting bodies. Long and short of it is some opted to resign altogether, and in one division a subordinate beat his boss in the interview process. Tables having flipped as such, the new boss then reassigned his former boss all those unsavory tasks that she had previously assigned him with considerable aplomb. Suffice it to say, much as there was no malice in his execution, she opted to quit not too long afterwards.

Karma at the office has three oil cans that lubricate its wheels:

Intent is about thoughts, which typically determine the motivate behind an act. Please, not every miss or mistake is motivated by negative thoughts or wrongdoing. Sometimes a mistake is just that; a mistake. Recognizing, being aware of and taking responsibility for something that you could have done better breeds you good karma at the office. Blaming your colleagues or juniors while tossing them under the proverbial bus is bad karma and just bad business.

Effort is action is doing, and it demonstrates one’s karma. You either pitch in and help a co-worker with shared objectives who needs an extra hand with nothing in it for you, or you make an excuse and adopt a fake busy look. You work on projects or accounts as part of a team and shirk carrying your weight because a particular task is not your responsibility. If you tell yourself that the colleague you dismissed is a bad karmic jerk who doesn’t deserve your help, the joke is on you. You have just created some interesting karma as a direct output of cause and effect. Think of it like your boss – it abhors excuses, desires teamwork, and elevates players that build on, not blast, a peer’s work. 

Perception is who we think we are at work. At the office, many people take on assumed identities that are often based on stereotypes. The techie geek, pompous sales guy, demanding boss, weird creative, we all know them. When we actually start to believe that we are the character that we play at work, objectivity and judgment is impaled. And karma, if nothing else, always relies on judgment. When we default to negative habits and alter egos based on the person others expect us to be, we stop learning and are more attuned to repeating bad behavior and embedding bad karma.

Author Doe Zantamata has an insightful view of reading karma. She reckons if you do something nice for someone with no expectation of anything in return and they question you as to why you are doing it or ask what’s in it for you, don’t take offense; they can only see what is in themselves in the world. They’ve just told you that they wouldn’t do anything nice for someone unless there was something in it for them. But also, if someone accepts a kind act gratefully with no question, they’ve just told you that they too would do nice things with no expectation of anything in return

So what can you do about people who seem to be constantly deliberately trying to wind you up so you can carry around negative vibe? Not much really. But there is a lot you can do about how they make you feel; Dr. Wayne Dyer the late ‘father of motivation put is rather succinctly, that how people treat you is their karma; how you react is your karma. You could begin with:

1) Find your balance. If another can easily anger you, then you are probably off-balance with yourself. Karma or no karma, Elizabeth Kenny’s famous retort of yore says he who angers you conquers you.

2) Set the right mental picture. Every single day is an empty canvas waiting for your paint. If there is something negative persisting in your life, try and envisage the desired picture and make an effort to keep that picture fresh in your mind daily; make choices that are in the direction of that picture. If something or someone does not fit into that picture, shift your attention on someone or something that does instead. Starting every day with this mental picture will help you plough through the dark patches that will inevitably crop up in the course of your day.

3) Practice energy conservation. If somebody is being a challenge to work with, starve them of your energy that they feed from. If you can get away with it, you need not go to meetings where those people will be there, nor return their phone calls. And this is not an avoidance strategy. There are some difficult people with whom you simply must interact. But the ones who add no value to you are the ones who should get no reaction.

4) Awareness. Be consciously aware of your body language and communication style, and of the signals you transmit. Be sensitive to how others perceive and are influenced by your non-verbal cues. There is a voice that doesn’t utter words; listen.

5) Embrace. The diversity in workplaces today is unprecedented and unavoidable. Be open to and sincerely embrace diversity in all of its forms, be it gender, tribe, culture, age, physical challenges, lactating mothers, students, emigrants, etcetera, and their unique needs and issues. Do this in an authentic, heartfelt, consistent, fair and sincere manner; not as a manipulative tactic.

6) Communicate. When discourse is open and embracing, good karma flows throughout the workplace, eventually returning to the sender in an uplifting wave of positive energy. Suffice it to say, supervisors and managers have a great role to play here, and also have the most to benefit from the outputs of greater employee motivation and enthusiasm, healthier more enjoyable, high energy working environment, enhanced tolerance and understanding for others, more cohesive and productive teams, and increased performance and great results.

 For budget-strapped managers who are more or less all managers in this day and age, creating positive energy at the workplace is cost-effective and often of greater and longer-lasting value than elaborate team-building events or expensive offsite sessions or drink-up TGIF evenings. In the long run, a culture of simple, selfless acts of gratitude inspires and motivates more people for a longer period than an isolated pay-rise or promotion, or an office fussball table, or a brightly-colored office wall with an inspirational inscription. Acknowledgement of good work makes more work go round better, and the workplace becomes a fun place with a positive buzz, generating an infectious forward-thinking spirit.

No job or employer is worth trading your health or well-being for, especially the hidden, slow-burning mental health. The ultimate good karma at work is like a vision statement; good thoughtful work for shared team success, incorporating sound judgment, demonstrating intent, and garnering achievement from overall awareness of needs and goals. Simply put, a terrific business partner.

Negative retrospect doesn’t make for great mental health. So next time you’re inclined to wish bad karma on a slacking colleague or a nasty boss, turn around and help instead. Because the only karma you should think about is your own.

No matter how much you regret, how angry or sad you become, your yesterdays will never return. The world of ‘should have’ or ’could have’ or ‘if only would have’ is a world of pointless suffering ~ Doe Zantamata