Firing someone and immediately leaving for a three-week vacation is a power move so bold it almost deserves respect. Not actual respect. But almost.
There is a whole category of management behavior that only makes sense if you assume someone else will quietly clean up the mess. The entire strategy depends on there being a responsible person nearby who cares too much to let things fall apart. That person is never the one who caused the problem. It is always the one who gets the panicked email from the entertainer asking why nobody is responding.
The debate about letting your workplace fall apart, just letting it fail, is one of the great workplace philosophical questions. On paper it seems fair. You did not create the situation, you were not consulted, and the natural consequences of bad planning should probably land on the person who did the bad planning. In reality it almost never works out that cleanly because the blast radius of someone else’s chaos tends to hit everyone except the actual decision maker who is currently at a buffet somewhere on a ship.
The other thing about letting it fail is that it requires you to do nothing, which is actually harder than it sounds when you are the one fielding the confused emails and watching a problem get worse in real time. Doing nothing on purpose while things collapse around you takes a surprising amount of commitment.
Going up the boss chain is one of the least pleasant things you can do, and we all know there’s no fun in being so corenerd, or should I say put between a boss and a hard place, you have to go over said boss’s head. But that’s why it’s probably almost always the right call in these situations.
Not because it fixes everything, but because it moves the problem to someone with the actual authority to deal with it. You document that you flagged it, leadership knows what happened, and you are no longer the only person holding information about an impending disaster.
Tattling isn’t fun or cool. You know what’s even less fun and even cooler? Letting yourself become an unpaid crisis manager for someone else’s vacation planning.
Author: Kayitsi.com
