[lostcolony]

No, that was the correct response.

If anything, you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head. He isn't looking to work with you or the team, he's actively seeking to undermine you; at that point his presence is a negative, not a positive.

[teddyh]

> you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head

Is escalating an issue a fireable offense?

[lostcolony]

When done in bad faith, yes.

This wasn't "I have an issue, my manager didn't address it", this was "I have an issue with my manager. He's an idiot. You shouldn't have made him manager. You should have made ME manager", etc.

There is nowhere to go with that. There is no way to fix that. There is no way to ignore that. And the employee is going to be killing team morale more and more the longer they stay at that company.

So your options are to leave the person where they are, killing the team's morale and effectiveness, go to management yourself and ask that the employee be listened to (meaning that now someone as problematic and full of themselves is being put in a management position, which will also lead to the team's productivity dropping to nothing), or you let the person go. Only one of these will leave the team intact.

[teddyh]

But suppose that the person made manager really is an idiot. You have now defined the situation such that merely bringing that fact to the attention of the higher-ups is a fireable offense, with no other recourse.

Also, making this a fireable offense only makes the complainer instead stay quiet, but they will still be “killing team morale”. So is that better?

[lostcolony]

If the person made manager is an idiot, you go to upper management with proof, focusing on particular actions, and you do it in a careful way.

"Hey, I wanted to raise up my concerns about X. I mentioned it to (manager), but I'm not entirely certain I communicated it effectively. If we don't do Y, Z will happen". Expect upper management to talk to the manager about it, and expect the manager to try and downplay the concern (or if they're treacherous, express outrage that you didn't talk to them about it; have proof of the conversation if that's a concern). If it doesn't lead to change and blows up, it will be noticed.

Better still - if you have anonymous surveys (most companies do), lambast the manager there (politely), and you place the impetus to change things on upper management there (provided a majority on the team agrees).

The reality is that upper management put the manager there -because they trust them-. They barely even know you. That's the reality. You can still talk to them, but you can't come off as though you're trying to undermine your manager. If upper management's response is to tell your manager "deal with it", you clearly came across as trying to undermine your manager; you're a problem. You just made it so it's your job or your manager's, since you just burned that trust, and in a public way that upper management is now aware of. A good manager will fire you because of the effect you're going to have on team morale. A bad manager will fire you because they feel threatened.

This isn't about what is hypothetically better, this is about what the reality is. The reality is that management is all about trust (really, working in groups is all about trust); upper management has to trust middle management, and middle management has to trust the ICs. Your bypassing your manager is going to look like a breach of trust with your manager (i.e., why didn't you talk to them and work it out with them?). Your claims may be right, but being right doesn't equate to being effective, nor does it excuse being stupid in what you do about it. This guy not only doesn't sound in the right, he also was stupid in how he approached it.

As a slight addendum, too - the reality is that managers that are 'stupid' may still be valuable to higher ups. The business is not evaluating managers the same way ICs are. If the manager makes a decision, overruling the ICs, and the ICs raise their concerns about the decision (NOT the manager), carefully, politely, and the decision leads to a bad outcome, upper management will notice. But I've had decent managers who were technically a bit clueless, but who knew to let the ICs make the decisions themselves; the team succeeded. You can have stupid managers who still run effective teams; if they're actually bad managers, upper management will notice. It may or may not be before you've made plans to leave yourself, but the reality is you can't force a manager to be replaced; you can only work to move yourself (to another team, or to another company), or wait for it to be noticeable and be careful to control the narrative.

[teddyh]

> do it in a careful way.

Sure, that sounds more reasonable. Your initial description could easily be interpreted as “If you go over the head of your immediate manager for any reason whatsoever, you are a liability to the company and deserve to be fired immediately”, which is mostly how I read it. Certainly, an employee must be careful when engaging the company in non-orthodox paths, just as you say, but employers must also be careful in how they communicate the possible options available to an employee; if what employers say comes across like my quote above, an employee can feel trapped and easily become disgruntled in a situation when upper management would actually want to be informed of said situation.

The onus is on upper management to make sure that employees feel safe enough to actually inform upper management of something management would like to be informed about, which includes counteracting middle management, since the incentive of middle management is to try and make sure that employees never ever go over the head of middle managment for any reason at all.

[lostcolony]

Very first thing I said - "When done in bad faith".

Sounds like you were perhaps arguing against a strawman? I never said don't ever go to upper management, nor that there is never a reason to go to upper management. Just that if someone goes to upper management the way this guy did, the right response is to let them go, that they are a liability to the team, the manager, and the company at that point. Honestly to themselves, too, but that's not on the manager to fix.

[cutemonster]

In many countries it wouldn't have been allowed to fire him.

I wonder how it'd been to be a manager, if he couldn't be fired, and he continued contacting the CEO etc saying you (GGP, whirlingdervish the throwaway) weren't any good at your job.

I guess eventually I'd quit (if I was in GGPs position and couldn't do much about it), and he'd become the manager in my place, if the plan hadn't been to hire another one.

[kubanczyk]

> In many countries it wouldn't have been allowed to fire him.

I'm in one of these countries. If they have a cause that cannot be legally used to terminate an employee, they just look long and hard for any other misdemeanors and fire them as fast as they gather any plausible "evidence". Creative types can also actively put an employee into a checkmate, i.e. a position where no move or any move is a fireable offense.

In this case it could be as simple as identifying any part of that email as a defamation.

[cutemonster]

Compare that unfortunate workplace "culture" (until the person eventually leaves / gets fired), with this article about psychological safety:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860743

I wonder if the lawmakers having made it almost impossible to fire someone, then damages the psychological safety in the company, in that the managers have to start looking for mistakes someone did and using it against him/her. I'd guess this sends bad vibes to the whole team.

Makes me wonder if this holds countries like, was is France?, back, when it comes to startups and innovation, hmm