Why harbor Woodchucks in corporate? HR message

Many woodchucks (groundhogs) do live in most corporate. They remain so, both knowingly and without being aware of such status. If the corporate and its HR function learn the idiosyncrasy of some people in exhibiting the groundhog behaviour, instead of blaming or firing such people the corporate can ‘utilize’ the potentials these people. Woodchucks are a group of marmots belong to the class Rodents. They live underground by making burrows/tunnels that are deep.

The interesting thing about this animal is that they usually make two to three entrances to their burrows to escape in the event of any danger. When they live so deep inside the burrows, why they still keeps many entrances to their burrows to escape and why still they carry such fear and insecurity. Quite contrary to groundhogs, many other rodents especially those non subterranean rodents, never seem to ‘overdo’ anything like woodchucks.

The reason being is when we attempts to secure our life by creating our dwelling place in ‘most’ secured place, still complete security and safety to our life is not fullu assured or guaranteed. A squirrel that lives inside a small tree hole has more reason to worry about its life than for the woodchucks that lives deep inside a burrow.

The message is that the issue of ‘insecurity’ is high even in subterranean habitat. The fact is that when we assume we are more secured, more fear about the ‘security’ arises.

Whenever a corporate employee does some ‘trick’ to save the job, always they tends to set ways to escape from the mess, when caught rather than developing skills to solve the problems. Some corporate employees always operate from such mindset. To escape, they create many entrances/emergency exits well before committing the mischief.

For their definite failures, they will ensure many ‘scapegoats’ for sacrifice well in advance. For their inefficiency, irresponsibility, callousness, they always try to hide inside a deep tunnel like the woodchucks. Like woodchucks, they also know the fact that however deep the burrow may be, keeping multiple entrances are inevitable to escape. They know their mischief and hence they build many ways to cover up the truth.

They are insecure because they have every reason to feel insecure. Understand these people as they are digging deep burrows in the foundation of your corporate. The very structure of your corporate culture may fall and crumble one day due to these people.

Unfortunately, the senior employees in most corporate only exhibit the behaviour of woodchucks and not the people in lower hierarchy. The HR function must learn this fact and must act accordingly to free the corporate from such ‘subterranean’ groundhogs.

Dr S Ranganathan