A case study on “controlled demolition” of low performers? How did this manager surreptitiously purge a team of “toxic” employees?

Confronted with two bad, low-performing employees, one manager went beyond formalities. Repair? Assign the pair to a collaborative project that is destined to collapse, engineering their exit. The online consensus was overwhelming approval of this bold maneuver.

on mail On the r/Confession subreddit on Reddit, which has 14,000 upvotes, the moderator set the scene. They described the two employees as “toxic” and “forever complaining about each other” despite their similarities and detrimental to a high-performing team — something they both took undeserved credit for.

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The manager’s solution, they wrote, was a cheeky corporate maneuver: a high-visibility, collaborative project over four weeks that would “collect evidence of performance, tactics, and results and present it back to other teams and our management group.” Knowing the personal animosity and workplace drama — including trying to date the same coworker — between the two, the manager predicted that the partnership would burn out in the best possible sense.

The manager’s predictions were accurate. The project served as the catalyst that accelerated the inevitable collapse and caused both employees to quit. “We’re in week 3 and they’ve both made complaints about each other and the leader, both received comments about poor work on the project, and had a big fight about relationship drama,” the director wrote. “Yesterday they were taken to a mediation meeting and both decided to withdraw.”

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While the manager succeeded in removing two underperforming “assets” from the team, the approach was too risky. One commenter pointed to the innocent third party who suffered a lot of collateral damage: the project leader charged with managing the duo. The original poster acknowledged the repercussions. “I took them to dinner today to apologize (and) let him choose his replacements,” they wrote.

Other users pointed out the significant, but often overlooked, costs of such an indirect tactic. “(This is) the best case, (worst) is that some high performers quit because they are tired of BS, or they turn high performers into low performers,” they wrote.