Combat for competitive edge – HR wisdom from sibilicide

Fatigued bosses in corporate do encourage fights among own team members. We may wonder why the corporate bosses behave strangely and often allow and encourage own people to fight and perish? Certainly this instinct has its origin from nature. Among many species of birds, sibilicide, a behaviour where the first hatched out chick would kill its sibling that is born later to maximize its survival change.

The chick (s) that hatches out last will always be small in size when compared to the chicks that were hatched out first. When the mother bird comes to feed the chicks, naturally the bigger chick would compete for food and eventually kill the weaker one either deliberately or due to starvation. The sibilicide is quite common when the food availability is scarce and season is quite bad. The mother bird may witness the rude sibilicide but would seldom interfere. The reason being, the mother bird finds it hard to feed all chicks. Hence she wants the weaker one to get eliminated in order to reduce her burden as well as to ensure the one that survives is healthy. In some rare instances, the mother also would use her dead chick to feed her other nestlings. It may sound strange and bizarre but indeed such an act has plenty of scientific purposes than silly sentiments.

Exactly like the above, many bosses in corporate do deliberately and consciously allow confusion and muddles to occur in the organization. Ironically the HR function in some corporate also encourage such confusion. They use such confusion and the fight amongst the team members to turns it to the people as they lack leadership quality, lack team spirit etc., and that is why they resorts to fight.

The unwise & ignorant bosses and highly selfish owners of some corporate are the one who often engage in promoting fights amongst own employees. The more painful aspect is that the winner of all such fights, these bosses appreciate and acclaim as very passionate people.

Unfortunately such bosses have seldom learned the difference between competitiveness and combat. By encouraging combat, such foolish bosses often presume that they are bringing competitiveness among people. No corporate can afford to have two people employed for the same job so competitiveness has to be increased to prove who does the job faster with great perfection. Every individual in corporate should have specific role and therefore each one must develop competitiveness in their respective job briefs and need not develop traits to excel others. In animal world no animal tries to prove other animal weak or insignificant and hence the competitiveness alone prevails in animal world. Animals do fight and even if they fight, such fights are limited to either breeding time or territory encroachment.

Never encourage combats among your people and instead infuse the essence of harmony and competitiveness. The competitiveness should be not to prove who is better than who but how one develop all required skills to accomplish the task and how one can envisage the future vision of the organization.

The message of sibilicide is different and the corporate must learn it in the correct perspective. Nature supports such odd event only with a positive intention. Combat will never bring competitiveness but instead it can only breed fatigue. HR must therefore audit whether the organization has many fatigued bosses as they not only do no job but also would cause fatigue among the team players.