Woman Maliciously Complies With Boss's Demands To Work From The Office, Makes Him Lose His Bonus And The Job

A good manager delegates work, but some take this so far as to not do anything themselves at all. Soon enough, employees are covering everything, leaving the boss to spend their time relaxing. But soon enough, an inexperienced boss will find that there is only so much a worker can do.

An employee shared their tale of malicious compliance with a lazy and pretty incompetent boss. Instead of doing his own work, this boss delegated all his work to his subordinate, while also ordering OP to maintain her own work. This mix of responsibilities was ultimately incompatible, but fortunately for OP, the boss's metrics ended up under scrutiny.

For every lazy boss, there is the control freak who refuses to allow anyone else to do things. In high-pressure environments, leaders often have to balance and juggle a lot of different tasks and can burn out very quickly if they refuse any help. Similarly, leaders are often picked for their exceptional abilities, so “giving away” these tasks end up making them feel like they are losing an ability they pride themselves on. To be clear, a leader that refuses to delegate is generally the lesser of two evils, as this story communicates. The worse variant is when the leader over delegates to such a degree that employees are overworked while the boss sort of just lounges around. This also gives the boss myriad opportunities and free time to defraud the company, as this story demonstrates.

Instead, the boss in this story created a perfect storm, making an employee cover tasks assigned to the manager that upper management really cared about, while also limiting this employee's ability to complete them. Sometimes a manager will have someone else do the more annoying, general tasks to let them focus on the “big stuff.” However, we know from OP that the tasks delegated to her were some of the key metrics assigned to her boss, indicating that he simply chose to disregard the direct wishes of corporate. While he has not been the first poor delegator and he won’t be the last, these sorts of bosses are ultimately destructive to more than their own careers and often cause general issues for the whole company.

OP mentions that her boss is an example of the Peter principle in full effect. This is the unfortunate management problem where a competent and skilled employee ends up promoted beyond their abilities like repeat best salesman Michal Scott ending up as a comically inept manager in “The Office.” The one upside is that once the employee is in a position where they can’t really perform effectively, they will not continue to rise. In extreme cases, companies will avoid this by employing an “up or out” strategy, which, put simply, means that workers who have not been promoted in a long enough period of time will simply be terminated. This basically trades employee morale for productivity, but at least incompetence will always have a shelf-life.

A cynic would suggest that some organizations actually promote the incompetent to help remove them from the workflow, which is the basis of the “Dilbert Principle.” In these cases, delegation actually benefits the company, as the skilled employees get the real responsibilities, and the nitwits get to feel important without actually doing anything. OP’s boss is revealed to be particularly useless, as he creates circumstances that fully prevent her from working her job and the tasks he delegated to him. So instead of enjoying a free ride, he ended up bringing down a magnifying glass on his activities and getting himself fired.