This post is Part 2 of last week’s post: Going Over My Boss’s Head: How It Started.

Over the following months I sent Bill several examples of Steve’s underperformance, including emails and screen shots documenting my points.

Three of my other colleagues were facing the same issues with Steve, and one of them quit abruptly over the challenge of working with him and his “Take care of this for me would you?” attitude.

I thought my colleague quitting might serve as some sort of wake-up call, but nothing changed. It was starting to become clear there was some reason the company wanted to keep him and that nothing I said would likely make a difference.

Nevertheless I persisted.

At least for a little while.

I had several more calls with Bill, by myself and with my other colleagues, and continued sending documentation of Steve’s underperformance. In response I received the same messages over and over again: “Steve is a really good guy” or “He has a different way of working than what you are used to.” And Bill’s favorite line, “Steve is a really good friend of the company.”

I also heard, “We need to let bygones be bygones” and “We need to not hold on to past resentments.”

In other words, please pipe down a bit. You’re being a little bothersome; could you just put your head down and do your job (as well as his)?

I now felt worse than I felt before I had raised these issues at all.

It was around this time that Bill sent an email to the whole team about the importance of practicing positive intent in the workplace.

If you strip away the context – the lemon tart vs. apple pie issues we’d now been raising for several months – the article has some good points and could be useful in a different situation.

But wading through the slime we were wading through, it felt more like a slap in the face.

It started out, “Everybody has to deal with stress in the workplace, some more than others. Whether it’s having to do more with less, or other stressful challenges, negativity can easily infect the workplace. Often that negativity can manifest in snap judgments and erroneous assumptions about co-workers, especially in tense situations.”

While this was sent to the whole team, I had a feeling it was intended for an audience of one.

It continued, “Because of our emotions, our view of co-workers is often seen through an incomplete lens. So, what’s the solution for a happier, less stressful, and more productive workplace? It’s the practice of positive intent.”

Next the article laid out how to practice positive intent in four steps:

Step 1 is, “Assume positive intent. Try and look for the bright side in any work situation. When confronted with a tough situation where it would be easy to assume the worst, take a breath and tell yourself that your co-workers, managers, or customers have good intentions; recognize that everyone wants to be successful in their jobs; avoid sending rash emails; stop yourself from taking any impulsive action based on strong negative emotions.”

Steps 2-4 are:

2: “Get the whole story.” (Each of us only has our own, limited perspective.)

3: “Give people a little bit of grace and the benefit of doubt. People will make mistakes. It’s not because they’re out to get you.”

4: “Let things go. When you hold onto resentment, you hold onto negative energy. Usually, the only person you’re hurting is yourself.”

Of course the points in this article have some merit: I do believe we need to assume other people have good intentions and give them the benefit of the doubt. I do believe that people make mistakes (myself included) and that we need to give each other grace.

While that’s all true, it doesn’t mean Bill shouldn’t have addressed systemic underperformance by a team member, which was raised by multiple team members and documented over the course of months, and which negatively affected the quality of our work and sunk our team’s morale into the gutter.

The final straw for me was when I spoke up again, perhaps for the fifteenth time, and received this nail-in-the-coffin message from Bill:

“I know you have frustrations with Steve, and as we’ve discussed, some of these are justified and others may be less so. It’s important that we work positively to make projects work with the teams we have. Steve’s done a fantastic job for this company over the years. Let’s be positive about what we can achieve together!”

A few moments passed while I stared dumbly at the screen, which showed three dots to indicate he was still typing. Then, “Try and reset your expectations about Steve too, otherwise you’re going to exhaust yourself.”

Message received, loud and clear.

Within a few weeks I put in a request to transfer teams, and within a few months, I switched to a new project within my company.

I’ve been happy on my new team and I’m learning a lot, though it’s not without its fresh set of challenges.

Reflecting on this situation, I’m frustrated by not only how my concerns were dismissed, but by how I was made to feel a little crazy for raising them. That I was raising the issue was more of an issue than the issue I was raising, in Bill’s eyes.

Clearly they wanted to keep this guy, for whatever reasons, underperformance-be-damned. They’d lose any other team members, let quality suffer, and let the project’s financials suffer (he got paid a lot to do very little) in order to keep him.

This was awhile back, and my old team is still limping along with Steve and Bill at the helm.

I learned a lot from this on how to manage and how not to manage a team.

I’m well aware I’m not the first person to have ever faced such a situation. Far worse than this happens all the time.

I also can’t help noticing that I am in a relatively privileged position.

In the end, I work for a company that I like and think is really good to its people. I have had an overall good experience with them, outside this situation. When I told some higher-ups outside my team what had been happening, they were very supportive, and put in my transfer request while promising to look deeper into what I’d raised on the team I was leaving behind.

I didn’t have to put up with this. I left the team. If I wouldn’t have been able to transfer, I likely would have left the company altogether and searched for another job (which I could have done because I have savings in my bank account).

It takes privilege to opt out.

Over time, my disappointment with Steve’s underperformance was eclipsed by my disappointment with Bill’s poor leadership. So Steve wasn’t a good fit for our project; who cares, really? Maybe he’d be great in another role on another team; maybe he has done great work in the past. Maybe he has friends in high places and so they allow him to coast. Not my business.

In the end, the real reason I quit the team was not Steve and his apple pie, but Bill’s mishandling of the situation: ignoring the issues while making us feel like we were crazy for raising them.

PS. Hi Bill – it’s me again. I just have one more thing to say on this, and then I promise I’ll leave you alone. If it was the case that you had to keep Steve on for whatever company reason, I would so much rather have had you call it like it was. Just say so! ‘Hi Georgie, your concerns are well noted, thanks for raising this. Unfortunately we don’t have flexibility on this one – it’s a matter of [whatever]. Out of my hands, unfortunately. But I appreciate all you and the team are doing to compensate.’ Wham! Done!

Have you experienced something similar?

Why is underperformance at the upper management level so often unaddressed?

I’m curious to hear what you think!