After six years, an employee quits his job to expose his manager's uselessness, triggering changes in the workplace exactly as he predicted.
Employees quit their jobs for a variety of reasons. And in today's working culture, it seems employees have more leverage when it comes to bringing about change by quitting. They are also able to hold employers to higher standards. u/Jlaw118 shared how he quit his job of six years to showcase to his higher-ups how incompetent his manager was.
The employee shares that he began working at the company in 2017 as a part-time warehouse worker. He was eventually promoted to a management role. He writes, "Myself and another colleague ran our department between us, only really reporting to our then line manager if we needed support with any part of our job, or time off, etc, but other than that he trusted us completely to run things."
The worker mentions that there were some stressful days but he had a really "good thing going." Fast forward to 2021 and the business made a few changes. They moved the individual's line manager to a different department and hired a new manager to solely manage his department. He was not happy with this decision but decided to give the new manager a chance.
Unfortunately, the new manager turned out to be an "absolute control freak" and "bully." In addition to that, his behavior was unpredictable in the sense that he could be supportive at certain times and become a bully the next. He was so insensitive that he "poked fun" at the employee for being in a car accident the previous year. The manager also targeted the individual and unnecessarily fuelled tensions between coworkers.
In March of 2023, the employee's girlfriend fell ill while she was pregnant, causing her to give birth to their son six weeks prior to the due date. He describes the time to be "awful" and "traumatic." He ended up having to take three weeks away from work, which resulted in a "mountain of work" accumulating at his office. The individual tried his best to catch up on it, but the manager asked him to do other jobs while his other two staff members did not do anything.
During May, the manager ended up making a big mistake and blamed the employee for it. He writes, "It caused issues between me and two colleagues I had to work closely with and I was threatened with disciplinary action." But with this experience, the individual realized how crucial he was to the manager and how the manager would be helpless without him.
The manager committed one more mistake and the individual decided to hand in his formal notice the next day. For the next four weeks, the worker observed how the manager struggled to take up his duties. These were jobs that the manager claimed were nothing. On their final day in June, the employee told one of his colleagues that the manager would either quit or be fired within three months.
Sure enough, within the next few weeks, the department massively failed its monthly audit. This caught the attention of the directors at the company as it had never happened before and they sent in people to investigate. A month later, one of the senior managers contacted the employee while he was on holiday, asking them for passwords. He ignored the call as he was on vacation and no longer worked there. The manager continued to make many mistakes at the company.
A month after that, the company finally suspended him as they realized that he couldn't do the job. The employee adds, "Month after that, management claims he quit with immediate effect. I think he was fired." The individual's three-month prediction turned out to be right. He shares that he now runs his own business, earns more and has a better work-life balance. People loved the story and lauded the employee in the comments section. u/BeautifulPhantom1 said, "He definitely found out what you did all day, the hard way."