Faced with two toxic, low-performing employees, one manager bypassed formal procedure. The fix? Assign the pair a collaborative project destined to implode, engineering their exit. And the online consensus was overwhelming approval for the bold gambit.
The Strategic Setup
On the post in the r/confession subreddit that garnered 14,000 upvotes, the manager laid the scene. They described the two employees as "toxic," "forever complaining about each other" despite their similarities and detrimental to an otherwise high-performing team — for which they both took undue credit.
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The manager's solution was a cheeky corporate maneuver: a high-visibility, collaborative project over four weeks that would "collate evidence of performance, tactics and results and present back to other teams and our management group," they wrote. Knowing about the personal animosity and workplace drama — including trying to date the same coworker — between the two, the manager predicted the partnership would combust in the best sense possible.
The Controlled Implosion and Its Outcome
The manager's forecast was accurate. The project acted as the catalyst that accelerated the inevitable breakdown and caused both employees to quit. "We are in week three and both have entered complaints about the other and the leader, both received feedback on poor work on the project and have had a huge fight over the relationship drama," the manager wrote. "Yesterday both were taken to a mediation meeting and both decided to walk out."
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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 that caught a lot of collateral damage: the project leader assigned to manage the duo. The original poster acknowledged the fallout. "I've taken them to dinner today to apologise [and] let him pick replacements," they wrote.
Other users pointed to the significant, often overlooked, costs of such a non-direct tactic. "[That's] the best case, [worst] case is some of the high performers quit because they are sick of the BS, or they turn the high performers into low performers," they wrote.
That concern was validated by a user's reply that recounted their case of workplace morale decay. "I've become a low performer in my job because they won't even write up the 2 that drag my whole spot down. I do the bare minimum most of the time… and listen to the most toxic duo complain that nobody does anything and how they're the best," they wrote.
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But overall many lauded the move as strategic genius. "That's some nextlevel 4D chess. You basically sped up what was gonna happen anyway and saved the team the drag," the top-voted reply read.
Another top comment invoked a legendary strategic mind. "Well played, Sun Tzu. Well played."
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