Employee Gets New Boss Fired After Proving His Rule Not To Use Competitor’s Phone Was A Mistake
Interview
New managers often don’t have a clear idea of how things are done and which employees they can rely on. So they need time to become comfortable in their role.
But when Reddit user MichigaCur, who worked at a cell phone network company, got a new boss, the guy started immediately doing things his way. One of the changes that he made was a hard ban on competitors’ services.
However, as MichigaCur explained in his post on the subreddit ‘Malicious Compliance,’ this became a problem when their own infrastructure started malfunctioning.
New bosses should learn the ins and outs of the company before making changes
Image credits: Wikideas1 / Wikipedia (not the actual photo)
But as this cell phone tower technician learned, not all of them do
Image credits: charlesdeluvio / unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Zac Durant / unsplash (not the actual photo)
Image credits: sedrik2007 / envato (not the actual photo)
Image credits: MichigaCur
“He wasn’t a bad guy, just not a good fit for that job”
We managed to get in touch with MichigaCur, and he was kind enough to tell us more about his malicious compliance.
“Our Monday morning calls were usually pretty laid back,” the Redditor explained to Bored Panda. “I remember that particular call being much more tense and quiet than normal, especially with the boss digging into me.”
“When VP joined, I think everyone breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t sure at that moment if he would get fired, but I knew that conversation was not going to be a comfortable one. Nor was it my intent to get him fired; I just wanted to prove that [the ban on using our competitors’ services] was an unreasonable policy.”
Everyone was really tight-knit. “Honestly, even with the no competitors’ phones policy, he really never brought down our spirits,” MichigaCur recalled. “He wasn’t a bad guy, just not a good fit for that job. Things returned to normal fairly quickly after his departure, just with a bunch of New York jokes floating around.”
This incident was just a one-time thing. “It was a great company to work for; I really felt like the owners and leadership cared for us,” the technician said. “The president and vice president had both worked their way up in the field and knew how to inspire others. Being a small company, I eventually learned more about the switch side. In time, I gained the skills to be able to fix those types of issues without remote support, [and] I probably would not have gotten that experience elsewhere.”
“Unfortunately, it was just too small and too far behind when the bigger companies started focusing on the area, [and] they were able to quickly overrun us,” he added.
The firing of the new boss’s boss shouldn’t come as a surprise
Image credits: Sora Shimazaki / pexels (not the actual photo)
If unchecked, the consequences of such failures can reverberate throughout an organization, and have a long-lasting impact.
“Managers have an outsized influence on their team members while being key players in nurturing the organization’s culture. When a transitioning leader is struggling, their direct reports perform 15% worse on average than those who report to a high-performing manager,” personal branding expert and cofounder of CareerBlast William Arruda said. “They’re also 20% likelier to leave the organization or be disengaged … We all know people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers.”
According to the Center for Creative Leadership, there are four skills every new manager must master:
- self-awareness;
- communication;
- influence;
- learning agility.
Judging from the Redditor’s post, his boss’s boss lacked at least a couple.
Very few American workers say their superior is dismissive (13%) and arrogant (12%), so the ones that are really stand out.
Hopefully, that guy took his firing as a learning moments.
As his post went viral, the worker shared more information on the ordeal in the comments
Some of the reactions involved people sharing similar experiences
In Australia late last year, the second biggest telco had a nation wide outage which took out both their mobile and landline services. Stupidly not even the CEO had a back up sim card for any of the other telco's that don't utilise their network so they had issues communicating to each other including their own technicians to resolve the issue. Unsurprisingly the CEO is now gone (this was her second strike after a major security breach earlier in the year). CEO's from the other telco's were asked whether they carried another telco's sim and all confirmed they did, purely for scenarios like this. It goes to show that it's not just small Telco's who have the problem the tech above experienced.
Any boss who issues blanket orders with no exceptions is a bad boss
The guy's lucky the VP was not also a narrow-minded/convenient-memory jackhole... I've definitely seen that happen. You can print the email and paste it to their foreheads and they simply "don't see anything". Interesting too to see the comments complaining about the length of the story... I figured people would be reading this in order to read the story. This isn't like those posts where you're looking for a recipe and you have to read non-recipe-related story until the recipe is down below.
In Australia late last year, the second biggest telco had a nation wide outage which took out both their mobile and landline services. Stupidly not even the CEO had a back up sim card for any of the other telco's that don't utilise their network so they had issues communicating to each other including their own technicians to resolve the issue. Unsurprisingly the CEO is now gone (this was her second strike after a major security breach earlier in the year). CEO's from the other telco's were asked whether they carried another telco's sim and all confirmed they did, purely for scenarios like this. It goes to show that it's not just small Telco's who have the problem the tech above experienced.
Any boss who issues blanket orders with no exceptions is a bad boss
The guy's lucky the VP was not also a narrow-minded/convenient-memory jackhole... I've definitely seen that happen. You can print the email and paste it to their foreheads and they simply "don't see anything". Interesting too to see the comments complaining about the length of the story... I figured people would be reading this in order to read the story. This isn't like those posts where you're looking for a recipe and you have to read non-recipe-related story until the recipe is down below.
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