“Work karma works much more slowly than real-life karma,” said a co-worker of mine recently. The more I think about it, the more I see her point. Corporate America does seem slow to reward exceptional behavior just like it is slow to punish poor performance. As such, it often appears as though most employees migrate into the invisible middle in which they do just enough to get by, without overexerting themselves for minimal reward or recognition. It’s certainly a sorry state, but I think it’s a fair description of reality.
A few months ago the marketing team that I lead was invited to join a team building activity hosted by our newly formed account management team. One of the evening’s activities was laser tag. In this event, four teams of four competed for 10 minutes in a small, black-lit room. Maybe we’ve watched Behind Enemy Lines one too many times because when the starter whistle blew, our team rushed to secure a protected corner of the room. We held our position, protected each other’s flanks, and sniped away at our coworkers who ran around like lost children in a dark room.
We destroyed the competition. For our marketing team, it was a great team building and team bonding activity. I can’t say the same for our coworker opponents. Our team more than doubled the scores of any other team. Our team member with the lowest score, scored more points than the highest scorer on any other team. As for me, it appears as though all that pheasant hunting came in handy. With flanks protected by my team, I was free to shoot away and in the end came away with the high score.
As we hung up the blue body armor and guns that we’d randomly selected at the beginning of the activity, we noticed that each suite came with a name that tied the shooter to a suit and suit to the leader board. The name on my suit – Karma.
As it turns out karma can, at times, make pretty quick work of things.