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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Zanadar on 2024-01-18 13:40:01.
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.
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 positions to run said teams, but 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 I trained my colleagues, handled payment authorizations through a roundabout way to circumvent company policy, which said I absolutely wasn’t allowed to do that, handled disputes within the team, checked over and corrected other people’s work, etc.
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 has gathered the teams to make an announcement. The person who had been doing the Team Lead job from the other team was being made into one officially. In our team? A girl we’ll call Jane was getting it.
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 said “Just do your job, stop acting like you’re important!”.
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 so eager, but Alice had approved it.
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 transferring numbers from one system into another. I honestly don’t believe Alice was aware of how big of a blunder she’d made here, she just picked someone she thought of as loyal.
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 performing up till then were my actual job.
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 busy advancing her career and Jane didn’t want to admit how hopelessly out of her depth she was.
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.
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 outsourcing program.
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.
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.