When faced with two toxic, underperforming employees, a manager bypassed formal procedure. The solution? He assigns the couple a collaborative project destined to implode, engineering their exit. And the online consensus was overwhelming approval of the bold tactic.
In the post on the r/confession subreddit that garnered 14,000 upvotes, the manager set the stage. They described the two employees as “toxic,” “always complaining about each other” despite their similarities, and detrimental to a high-performing team, for which both took undue credit.
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The manager’s solution was a blatant corporate maneuver: a four-week, high-visibility collaborative project that would “gather evidence of performance, tactics, and results and present them to other teams and our management group,” they wrote. Knowing the personal animosity and workplace drama (including trying to date the same coworker) between the two, the manager predicted the partnership would explode in the best way possible.
The manager’s forecast was correct. The project acted as a catalyst that accelerated the inevitable crisis and caused both employees to resign. “We’re in week three and they’ve both filed complaints about each other and the leader, they’ve both gotten feedback about poor work on the project, and they’ve had a huge fight over relationship drama,” the manager wrote. “Yesterday they were both taken to a mediation meeting and they both decided to leave.”
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While the manager successfully removed two underperforming “assets” from the team, the method carried substantial risk. One commenter pointed out the innocent third party who suffered a lot of collateral damage: the project leader assigned to manage the duo. The original poster acknowledged the consequences. “I invited you to dinner today to apologize (and) let you choose replacements,” they wrote.
Other users pointed out the significant, often overlooked costs of such an indirect tactic. “(That’s) the best case scenario, and the (worst) case is that some high performers quit because they’re sick of the nonsense, or turn high performers into low performers,” they wrote.