New Hotshot Manager Gets Rid Of A “Not Flexible Enough” Employee, Makes An Expensive Mistake

The famous Portuguese soccer coach Jose Mourinho has been considered a kind of “cancellation fee king” for many years – four layoffs before the end of the current contract brought Ted Lasso’s former adviser the equivalent of almost $109.4M, which, for example, is more than the three largest dead cap hits in NFL combined. If highly experienced general managers in professional sports allow themselves such oversights, what can we say about ordinary bosses, even those having an MBA degree?

So here’s one more such story, from the user u/umataro, to whom the newly minted manager’s indiscretion brought, in his own words, ‘the best year of his life’, and for the hapless boss himself, in turn, it cost him his job. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves…

The author of the post had been working in a high-paid position at a UK-based company for seven years

Image credit: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken (not the actual photo)

At one point, the author’s MIL got diagnosed with cancer, so he had to use a hybrid remote schedule

Image credits: umataro

The newly hired manager with an MBA degree wasn’t happy with this and started reproaching the author literally every day

Image credits:  Vincent Lebis (not the actual photo)

Image credits: umataro

One day the manager told the employee that he’d decided to make him redundant – and our hero agreed on the spot

Image credits: Michael Coghlan (not the actual photo)

Image credits: umataro

It turned out that the author’s contract provided for 6 months’ full pay in this case – and the manager didn’t even have a clue of this

So, according to the Original Poster (OP), years ago he landed a high-paying IT job at a high-speed trading company in London. The author of the post had been working for the company for about seven years until his mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and his wife moved to their home country to care for her mom.

The OP himself agreed with the management on hybrid remote work – fortunately, his native country was very close, so the “3 days in the office plus 2 days at home” scheme actually meant eight short flights a month for him, and this, you see, is quite doable. But this went on for only half a year – and then the company’s higher-ups hired a new hotshot MBA manager…

This manager immediately took a dislike to the author – apparently, because hybrid remote work was not part of his management paradigm. The HR lady also sided with the new boss, letting herself criticize the OP for his ‘inflexibility’ as well. And literally at every work meeting, when the author of the post was online, the new manager started with various reproaches against him.

And so, after some time, the manager and the HR lady invited the original poster to a meeting, during which they announced that they planned to make him redundant as this was apparently better for the author than firing him or himself quitting and he’d get more money from the UK government. Apparently, the OP states, neither the manager nor the HR (who also joined the company much later than him) actually bothered to review his contract, which in this case provided for 6 months’ full pay. And our hero, as we remember, had a very highly paid job!

So, the OP willingly agreed and signed all the papers, reasonably fearing that the manager would change his mind – after all, according to the law of his own country, the unemployment support for the first 3 months would be 90% of his average previous year’s salary, followed by 60% for 9 months. So, along with six months of redundancy payments, that amounted to just insane money literally out of the blue. But what pleased the original poster even more was the news that his offender (or benefactor – it actually depends on the angle from which you look at it) also got axed soon after. Apparently, the board wasn’t happy with the ‘dead cap hit’, formed by the company through the fault of this manager…

Image credits: jgurbisz (not the actual photo)

“This story teaches us once again that we should always read the terms of a contract carefully first, whether it’s a multi-million international business contract or a modest job agreement,” says Olga Kopylova, Ph.D., associate professor of economics at Odessa National Maritime University, to whom Bored Panda reached out for a comment on this particular situation. “And, of course, the HR also let the manager down. In some situations, such miscalculations really end in layoffs – but for some reason it seems to me that this situation has become just one of the ‘red flags’ regarding this manager.”

“After all, if an employee who has worked in the company for more than seven years and, judging by his contract, has worked quite successfully, causes dissatisfaction with the newly hired manager, this partly indicates the newcomer’s insufficient managerial skills. After all, an MBA is by no means a panacea, as numerous examples from various business areas show,” Olga summarizes.

By the way, in the comments we can find another great news from the original poster – it turns out that his mother-in-law managed to pull through her disease. In addition, as the OP himself recalls, his unemployment case officer really wanted to stop this “festival of unheard generosity”, literally bombarding him with various job offers – however, due to his rather narrow specialization, not all of them suited the author of the post, and he is ironic that ‘always said it would hurt his career prospects in the long run.’

In addition, commenters are amazed how the manager could even overlook such a crucial nuance in the contract – and, judging by the author’s answers, he didn’t have a clue of it at all. “Would love to have seen his reaction,” people in the comments wondered. In addition, some folks even question the importance of an MBA in contemporary business. “MBA is the worst degree of all time,” one of the people in the comments stated peremptorily. And what do you, dear readers, think about this whole case, as well as about the true significance of MBA education?

People in the comments are cracking up at the hapless manager and even questioning the MBA degree’s significance at all

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