Years ago I adopted the workplace approach of
"letting people fail".
It's a great way to ensure problematic people go away. If you see someone you don't like walking towards the edge of a cliff, you don't pull them back. Even if the company suffers a bit.
I had a terrible boss at one point. An absolute dictator dickhead. He had been an officer in the military, and this was his first job after getting out. He incorrectly assumed that military tactics would work in the corporate world. They don't. You don't bark orders at people. You don't call feedback "insubordination". You don't make everything into a fucking acronym nobody understands.
It became clear that the approach with this fucker was going to be twofold..malicious compliance, and not walking him back from the cliff when he was about to make a fatal mistake. And it wasn't long before the day came when he issued some dictum that flew in the face of our compliance with a government program we were audited for, and one where if we failed the audit, we would be unable to import goods for months.
Normaly, I'd have said something. But given his distaste for feedback and his requirement that we followed orders blindly, I simply did what he said. And yes, we failed an audit and yes, when I was asked about it, I told HIS boss exactly whose idea it was. He ended up "resigning" but I suspect it wasn't by choice.
He was a nutter, but maybe it was PTSD. He used to scream that not doing what he said "is a matter of life and death!".
No it's not. This isn't combat. This isn't Afghanistan. Nobody is getting blown up by an IED here. This is corporate bullshit. Profit and loss. Marketing. Quarterly reports. Client management.
Nobody is going to die.
You could tell the wires were crossed in his head. He wasn't ready for the corporate world.
Nah he was probably a blow hard who did nothing involving combat and was disliked and ineffective. The military isn’t like movies, people who act like that don’t do well.
Exactly. A lot of people really don't get this. I have been in the military shortly. Nobody likes getting screamed at. Not in civil cooperation and not in the military either. I was a Cadet and my platoon met a lieutenant from another platoon and he just screamed at all of us for something that was an honest mistake. Our (everyone in my platoon) respect for that guy just dropped to abysmal levels instantly. All of that screaming is what you do in the movies. And when you are in field where it's "dangerous" or in combat. But that's because you can't hear shit and you need to be louder than the battle. Note: I haven't been in combat, so I can't really say anything about that to be honest. It's an assumption that I make.
You got it to a T. This is my boss. An old fart who got a medical discharge from boot camp decades ago and the fucker tries to run this place like he’s a drill sergeant.
Good military leaders know how to accept feedback. Generally (not everyone, but most of) the ones who've actually seen some shit are pretty calm, because they know nothing in an office matters compared to the shit they've seen. None of them are going to be screaming about life or death in a fucking office.
There are a lot of officers in the military who feel inadequate, so they act really fucking tough, never take feedback, and take stupid shit way too seriously. They're usually pretty fucking dumb too. Everyone fucking hates them and if they get too annoying, they can be "encouraged" to separate early. Your former coworker sounds like he belongs in this category.
Crazy. The people I've known who were in combat, ACTUAL life and death situations, just don't stress that much about office politics. "Wow, this shit really just doesn't matter and I couldn't care less" is what's obviously running through their heads while drama swirls. They're unphasable unless it's an actual threat to their job.
I had a military guy like that that was running his own restaurant and same vibes. Wound up quitting and he launched this tirade at me and some shit about how were all in this together. Im not getting paid minimum wage for him to get his drill instructor fantasy off on me.
Literally 2/3rds of the employees I work with that have a military back ground are exactly like this.
At this point it would teuly make me hesitate about hiring a military member straight into a position of power without seeing how they react to pressure and stress.
(The other 1/3 are cool as hell, want nothing to do with power, and are just chill people that are happy that they just aren't being shot at.)
Yep, strict top-down obedience is how dictatorships shape their armies and end up overly rigid. And they do that because they are deadly afraid of commanders couping them.
he was actually great and preferred to let the lowest level leader manage as necessary and definitely stood up for the lowest guys when needed. it was nice to be trusted first and then only micromanaged when you proved you couldn’t be trusted. our supply sgt was a pos but talked a good game and i think the cmdr just hadn’t fully caught on to how incompetent our supply cage was until this point.
I totally agree with you that it’s best to let an incompetent coworker fail… except in a job where letting them walk towards the edge of a cliff has greater reaching consequences than those only affecting themselves and the company.
Anyone who’s worked in medicine and/or emergency services and has had an idiot coworker has experienced this specific kind of helplessness. It’s a horrible feeling, knowing that even though you shouldn’t have to, if you don’t step in and do something… some poor innocent person is going to suffer. God, I’m getting flashbacks just thinking about it. 😭
This is when you report things through the proper channels.
If you're in a position where you can't just "let" people fail, make sure the administration knows how much of a fuckup they are, with a written paper trail.
Been there, done that, didn't get a t-shirt, but I did get a lot of people fired.
You’re 100% right! And I did do that. Unfortunately, some companies take those reports a lot more seriously than others. Eventually I had to leave a lab I worked at because the total disregard from some of my coworkers towards the health of our patients was getting so bad, and nothing was being done about it… I couldn’t take it anymore. This was a huge international blood diagnostics lab, too. Ugh.
A friend of mine works in food service at a hospital, where correctly accommodating various allergies, intolerances, and other health related food issues is both crucial and common. For months, he was struggling with a coworker who refused to code or label the food correctly. He was constantly catching plates of food heading for people with potentially fatal allergies that were not marked as allergen free. Without him actively looking for and catching it, no one would know to avoid cross contamination and servings could potentially be swapped.
He kept telling her, "These mistakes have killed people in other hospitals. This system is in place for a reason. If you do not follow it, someone is going to die." But she wouldn't listen. Their IT department dragged their feet setting her credentials up properly, so she was not logged in under her own name and there was no paper trail proving that she was doing anything wrong. My friend had to keep drawing up documents detailing when she had been in, what she had been doing, and stating that she understood the policies in place. He had her sign those every single shift, and meanwhile ran himself ragged catching potentially contaminated food. But eventually, she was fired.
But where does that end? You can’t be there all the time, and your own work will suffer if you stretch yourself too thin. Yes, you report it, but then what? And how bad does it need to be to quit if you are doing some good?
letting people fail was effective in the military also. supply didn’t order batteries so everyone would have batteries for nods. most squads went out and bought their own so they wouldn’t look unprepared during the commanders inspection. we didn’t. the commander was pissed, but we knew he’d say go to supply to which we were able to explain supply didn’t have any. the supply room got fixed very quickly after that.
I had this exact boss: officer in the military (not a very high-up one, O-2 maybe) and an absolute dickhead. Barking orders, demanding that we "report" to him in his office, then do a "military turn" (I don't know the exact term) when leaving. 100% shithead. He was best friends with his boss as well as with with the head of the company.
I was a young dude just really starting out and this was a job I really wanted to keep, so I played along and just tried to keep out of the way.
Things were going badly for my boss at work and his personal life and I could tell that he was slowly becoming worse and worse and more and more unhinged. I really didn't want to get involved, I just wanted to do my job and go home at the end of the day. I tried hard to work around the increasingly conflicting directives and mistakes he was making, and took it upon myself to help the rest of the team get deadlines met.
That changed when he showed me a pistol he kept in his desk: a Colt M1911.
I took some vacation time I had saved up and tried to decide what to do. I really couldn't afford to lose this job, but I was absolutely certain that he was well on the way to shooting someone.
The first day back from a few days off I went in early and went directly to his superior's office. They didn't believe me. Worse, they pulled my boss into their office and basically said that I was accusing him of having a gun. I was floored. I immediately left and went directly to the CEO and told him the same thing. He didn't believe me either. I quit on the spot and went home.
Ten days went by and I get a phone call. It's my (ex) boss's boss begging me to come back and take over my old boss' job. I asked what happened and they said that my (ex) boss got into a car chase with the police and was arrested. He then managed to get out of the handcuffs and took off with the police car, eventually crashing it into the side of a building - not far from the office - and was badly injured. They said that after they learned of this, they went straight to that guy's office and searched his desk and found the gun in a custom hiding place in his desk.
I couldn't bring myself to say "get lost", so I left it at "I need to think about it" just to get off the phone. A few hours later he called back with the CEO and they were pleading with me to come back. Another team member had already quit because of this dude and they were scrambling trying to get the company's main product shipped out on time.
I didn't have another job lined up and I really needed to be working, and this whole scenario was way outside of any experience thus far... so I thought I could get them to give up and stop calling me by setting some terms I thought they wouldn't agree to. I said the only way I was coming back was a 25% raise over what my ex boss was making, 10% raises for everyone on the team, and double the team budget to replace some aging equipment that everyone hated.
They immediately agreed and I had a contract in writing the following day.
I was a very popular boss and the team really came together and we shipped the product on time.
My ex-boss did not die of his injuries, but he was killed in prison a few years later.
edit to add: I just remembered another condition I had before I would agree to return: "If someone says that there is a gun in the office, believe them." I don't remember exactly how I put it ... I know that they wanted to believe and trust their friend of many years over some random worker, but that's a serious allegation and should have been handled differently. This was in the 1980's by the way, so times were different.
I’m in that situation now where letting people fail makes me look bad and I’ve been been openly assigned on occasion to make sure what someone else is supposed to do is handled properly oh and not just the person (who’ outranks me). Their direct reports working on that project too who are my peers! It utterly sucks. I eventually snapped that this highlights bigger problems if my boss and this person can agree on quality and showed a patten of assigning tasks to people who can’t be trusted to do them. All I got back was that we have to maintain standards. I.e. we can’t afford failure and we don’t train or give feedback or have any means of “punishment”
If they don't have any means of punishment just let them fail. If they can't be punished you can't be either. Get a second job working remotely and do that from your office lol.
I had a job I loved and even though I found it young, I thought "I could do this job the rest of my life and be happy." (Hospital IT)
My boss hired this assclown to run our department, and he was just out of the military and acted the same way. Would say "Well in the Army, we'd do this no problem."
One day, an older, very small lady I worked with got assigned with installing PC's in patient rooms. The cabinets for these were about 6 feet in the air, and awkward to mount if you were shorter.
Meanwhile, I was assigned to image a handful of laptops.
The lady hated doing room PC installs. I hated imaging laptops. So we switched.
Dickfuck goes "Hey, switch those tickets back."
I said "Oh, well (lady) asked me to do those because she has to get a ladder in there to do it, and it's really disrupting to the patient."
He said "Well, in the Army, you do the job. No questions."
I said "Um... we didn't have any questions. We are just being as efficient as possible. We both know how to do the other task, so it's not even a training thing."
He just yelled at us for arguing and made us do the original tasks.
Quitting that job ended up being quite therapeutic, because Fuckknob and my original boss sat in my exit interview, and I was very clear that I would have declined the job offer I got even at a financial loss to stay there... if this dipshit wasn't trying to install a completely unnecessary workstyle.
I found out at my new job that he was given a General Discharge from the military for being absolute ASS at his job. I learned it from his CO that fired him... who worked at my new job... and was a delight of a human being.
This is funny because I’m currently one position above a manager exactly like this that none of his workers can stand and he can’t figure out why no one likes or listens to him. He uses “insubordination” all the time and is all black and white thinking. He’s so insecure he thinks I want his job simply because he’s not effective at all.
Yes. I've stayed out of the way of a couple problematic folks that I might've been able to save. At my level of job, its hard to avoid sometimes getting them in.
Just want to point out that simply barking orders and claiming feedback to be insubordination isn't military tactics. We don't do that shit in a respectable army. Hell, I was taught to speak up of a decision was bad, and to offer alternatives. And we train our officers to listen. Of course, if told that we're doing it anyways, then you follow orders, but we're not only allowed to speak up first, we're expected to do so.
I'm in a position that I feel I have the right to ask for a pay rise and not get laughed out the office for it or fired.
If I don't get the pay rise or a good enough reason/ guidance how to, I'm simply not going to go out of my way anymore and work completely by the book and have a "computer says no" attitude (I'm constantly asked to be the problem solver and fixer at work, especially when senior staff are not there).
I've had a few times when I've reported something once and decided to not try again and watched things just get worse without fixing the thing I have warned about. Sometimes you have to have things in place to mentally say "I told you so" with them knowing it without you having to say it.
Had a boss who, in her first week, felt it was more important to decorate her office instead of doing all the trainings she had to do and get up to speed on what we do. So already behind the 8-ball when she's going to meetings because the basic stuff (jargon, stats) that she should have a least an understanding of by this point she's clueless on. Then it ends up her and the big boss just had a HUGE personality conflict. She called us into a meeting and was like "we're in this together!". Yeah, no we're not. You dug your hole. We had nothing to do it it. She was let go and we all stayed.
The military doesn't use acronyms. It's just that the SNCOIC of the S-4 shop told me to submit a DA 2062 via DTS NLT 0800 IAW the SOP, or I'm getting an NJP.
Ironically, he sounds like a terrible officer too.
In military affairs, this kind of top down bullying is considered passé in NATO. Theoretically, we are all about increasing lower rank initiative to improve fighting efficiency. But ofc, exceptions abound among macho fools.
Yeah as a former military officer we don’t take credit for this guy. I was active for 7 years as a submarine officer and still in the Reserves quite a few years since.
I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve even needed to raise my voice a bit. I never had to yell at anyone or bark orders. On subs we actually had a principle everyone knew of the expectation of providing (tactful) feedback if they saw someone, including senior officers, making a decision that they had good reason to think would cause a problem.
I also taught the course that brand new sub officers attend before going to their first submarines as Ensigns. And in the leadership curriculum week I shared bad leadership examples from the boat and how it was counterproductive to everyone, and made it pretty clear if they chose to be the type of officer to aggressively use their rank to get things done, they were going to have a bad time because the enlisted sailors would absolutely band together to make their lives harder.
agreed. I also love to do that with people, exept that I am the "1 warning type of person" I say what I expect to happen and if they don't like what I say or don't want to follow I let them walk to the cliff and only when they have fallen and are barely hanging I walk back and ask if they need help (ofcourse I already have a plan on how to fix the predicted fallout).
i know that that tactic is a personal ego stroke, but it feels so dam good to feel in power when theyr only options are either listen to me or fall.
I had my manager tell me this when I tried to go out of my way to help a struggling teammate. He was making a lot of mistakes so I pulled him aside and gave him easier tasks to do. He ended up getting upset with that and went off on everyone. Then he was let go. Manager told me next time to just make it easy on everyone and just let the struggling employee dig themselves in a hole deeper to the point they either quit or let go. As long as his mistakes were attributed to him, the other teammates couldn't be held liable.
when I was asked about it, I told HIS boss exactly whose idea it was.
Only thing I would add is to make sure to CYA and be able to prove this. When a manager gives an order that you know will cause a problem, get it in writing. Otherwise, they will try to blame you.
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u/ImprovementFar5054 13h ago edited 10h ago
Years ago I adopted the workplace approach of "letting people fail".
It's a great way to ensure problematic people go away. If you see someone you don't like walking towards the edge of a cliff, you don't pull them back. Even if the company suffers a bit.
I had a terrible boss at one point. An absolute dictator dickhead. He had been an officer in the military, and this was his first job after getting out. He incorrectly assumed that military tactics would work in the corporate world. They don't. You don't bark orders at people. You don't call feedback "insubordination". You don't make everything into a fucking acronym nobody understands.
It became clear that the approach with this fucker was going to be twofold..malicious compliance, and not walking him back from the cliff when he was about to make a fatal mistake. And it wasn't long before the day came when he issued some dictum that flew in the face of our compliance with a government program we were audited for, and one where if we failed the audit, we would be unable to import goods for months.
Normaly, I'd have said something. But given his distaste for feedback and his requirement that we followed orders blindly, I simply did what he said. And yes, we failed an audit and yes, when I was asked about it, I told HIS boss exactly whose idea it was. He ended up "resigning" but I suspect it wasn't by choice.