“I hope they don’t strike.” That was my thought before I reserved a window seat and bought a train ticket from Basel to Frankfurt.
Resistance takes many forms. A board can ignore ten thousand striking workers, but it cannot fail to see them. Loud resistance is the easy case. Every leader notices it and can act on it. The quiet kind is where most managers fail, because it’s diffuse and hard to spot.
Take working strictly by the book. The conductor follows every safety rule and checks the tickets with a slow, almost artful reluctance. Everything else gets left behind at the station, literally. Customer service? No. Just the bare minimum the rulebook asks for.
Then there are the power plays. Information moves late, incomplete, or not at all. You let a colleague walk straight into the blade, and the whole organization takes the hit. Once again, the customer pays the bill.
An especially effective one is humor. Which is strange, because humor is supposed to bring people together. A team that laughs together, that teases and jokes, is usually a healthy one. But sarcasm, cynicism, and pointed remarks dressed up as jokes quietly erode relationships, teams, and companies. What’s left for the customer is the gallows kind.
Even experienced, weathered leaders miss the quiet forms. Watching closely and listening even more closely is the radar a manager needs. Still, it works like grammar. The moment you understand the rule, you run into the first exceptions.
The Deutsche Bahn did not strike, and I got into Frankfurt reasonably on time. It would have been easy to build the rulebook, the power games, and the toxic humor into a neat story about the trip. But it wouldn’t have been true. The conductor guided us, in the middle of a full software crash, with genuine care. Dry humor, sure. Still funny. The guy working the bistro car was drowning because half his inventory never arrived, and he was so straight with people about it that nobody had it in them to be mad.
Warm regards, Ralph
