'Stop acting like you're important!': Performance collapses when boss tells worker to do their own job instead of the extra work they had been doing

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    r/r/MaliciousCompliance Posted by u/Zanadar 9 hours ago Just do your job, stop acting like you're important! LOC n This is a long one, I've tried to restrain my verbose tendencies as best I could, but it's still a lot, sorry. As such the story may seem a bit truncated in places, that's me trying to keep the word count down. I've kept details vague deliberately since I generally don't like giving identifying information.
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    Background Some years back at the start of my career I worked in insurance. My team was new and our boss, lets call her Alice, was VERY ambitious. She'd started off as a Team Lead managing a similar team to ours and through spending most of her time networking, bootlicking and making herself the center of important, high visibility projects she'd managed to score a promotion to Manager and was given our team along with her old one.This was very unusual, since she should have gotten two Team Lead
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    that's how it had worked out. She had already been disinclined to pay much attention to the actual work even before her promotion, after we basically barely ever saw her. Her ambitions hadn't stopped at her current achievements, so she was always busy trying to keep climbing the corporate ladder. So that the teams could actually run, she picked the two most ambitious people from each team and made them do her job with no promotion or pay increase. I was that person from my team. For about a year
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    Our company had a policy that once a year we had a skip-level one-to-one with our boss's boss. At that meeting I brought up how unnatural our situation was. The Senior Manager replied that she hadn't known myself and the person from the other team were doing so much and agreed that the structure should be reverted to how it's supposed to be. Indeed, a couple of weeks later internal postings for the two Team Lead positions get posted on the company intranet. Fast forward a month or so, and Alice
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    Now I wasn't the only one flabbergasted. Both teams were extremely confused and several people even voiced that confusion. I didn't know this at the time and only became aware during my eventual Exit Interview, but Alice had NOT liked that I'd gone over her head, even if she'd benefited from it ultimately. So, in retaliation she'd given the actual position I'd been doing up until that point to someone else. In a one-to-one meeting with her later when I brought the subject up, she got angry and s
  • 06
    The malicious compliance Remember how I said Alice was too busy to ever do her actual job? She paid attention to none of it, including individual team performance. Jane had only been picked because she'd been part of Alice's old team originally and was perceived as loyal to Alice. We'd needed someone to do the really boring data entry parts of the job which nobody else wanted to do, and the other team had recommended her. I guess we should have been suspicious at that point as to why they were s
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    As it turned out, they'd wanted rid of her, because Jane was stupid. I'm not using that as an insult but as a descriptor. She was genuinely very unintelligent and struggled with anything beyond very basic data entry tasks. When she was made to do anything harder, she'd generally make a complete mess of it. And now she had to actually run an entire team, train people, approve payments, check other's people's work and so on. All while she herself struggled with anything more complicated than trans
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    Of course, Jane tried to have me basically babysit every action she took, but I was having none of it. I was going to do my own job, and nothing else, since I wasn't important. For context for our US friends, we all had contracts with detailed job descriptions and in my country you can't just fire people for no reason. And refusal to do work that's not in the job description is certainly not considered proper cause. I was just a regular employee, none of the management functions I'd been perform
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    The fallout. The team crashed HARD over the next three of months. Complaints went from less than 5 a month to over 20 on average, a lot of incorrect payments were doing out, a huge backlog of cases were piling up. Nobody else on the team wanted to help Jane because they knew they'd just end up having to do her job for her for no benefit. The funniest thing was, Alice barely had an inkling there was a problem, beyond me being uncooperative (which she was pretty vindictive about), because she was
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    Things came to a head when the quarterly reports caused alarm bells to ring amongst the leadership team. An internal audit was organized and a lot of the mistakes that had gone through and a whole bunch of leakage were uncovered. Alice had to go explain herself as to why our performance was suddenly so terrible. At this point she'd finally realized she should have paid more attention to the situation, but unbeknownst to even her, it was too late.
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    Everything from here on is hearsay, I learned it from a friend who was a team lead of a completely different team, so take it with a grain of salt. Apparently there had been talks about outsourcing teams to India, however Alice's boss (the one who opened the team lead positions) had been staunchly against it, since it would diminish her fiefdom. The proponents of the outsourcing managed to use our team's horrible quarterly results to justify using the two teams under Alice as a pilot for the out
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    Quite literally the next day after I'd accepted a position in a different company and was planning on giving notice, we were gathered and informed our teams would be shuttered in 4 months and that we'd be training our replacements in India during that period. I heard from colleagues who stayed till the end that Alice was not offered another position after her teams were made redundant. Not surprising really, open Manager positions and new teams didn't exactly grow on trees.
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    Sadly the pilot was considered a success (which honestly I personally find somewhat dubious, but the Indian center was certainly a lot cheaper than us), and I learned via Linkedin about a year and a half later that the entire department had been shuttered. So realistically, the whole thing was probably inevitable, but at the very least Alice could have bought herself an extra year if she'd cared a bit more.
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    mrki008 8 hr. ago Great story, unfortunately I heard/lived lot of stories that management gives promises: do extra work with no pay, it will pay off later... and when later comes there is always an excuse why nothing happened. some had happy endings, some not, and I am glad your story turned this way for main bad guy. Vote Reply Share
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    not_so_chi_couple - 7 hr. ago It amazes me that I keep hearing this time and time again, all Alice had to do was keep her underpaid employee happy and she could have coasted on your work to another promotion, but instead she decided to be petty and ended up being made redundant (which she clearly was from the start) Reply Share Vote
  • 16
    Zoreb1 Friend worked at a bank's IT department. That department got sourced out and friend let go. Turned out my friend knew the legacy software and the new folks didn't. They wanted him back on a short term contract; he wanted six months (maybe three) due to his losing unemployment medical benefits (he's have to cover that under the new contract which reduced his actual pay enough to make it not worth the effort). Bank instead hired 'MacroHard' for much more money and a longer time frame. . Vot
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    still-dazed-confused 7 hr. ago Did you get the redundancy or did you leave a little to soon? Vote Reply Share Zanadar OP 7 hr. ago I had gotten and accepted an offer quite literally the day before the announcement, so I only caught the first of the four months of training the Indian team. Not even that really, since I took leave for the last week of my notice. Only the people who stuck it out till the very end got compensation. Vote Reply Share ...
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    gracefullrose 8 hr. ago I suppose this is compliant, but it seems to fit more in the antiwork sub instead. Vote Reply Share Zanadar OP 8 hr. ago . I think part of it was me trying to keep it short, which ended up with cutting out a lot of the back and forth after I refused to do the job I didn't actually have. There was even a meeting with Alice after : had hit the fan that I actually got to throw the title back in her face when she asked why I wouldn't help. So it felt malicious and vindicating
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    AlaskanDruid. 1 hr. ago I love it how management thinks that employees under them are supposed to train their replacement.. nope. That's management's job. Not in the job description of employees (usually). ✩ Vote Reply Share

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