

Former co-founder sabotaging  - jground

I work at a company that got acquired a while ago. One of the co-founders who used to be my boss and a C-level executive, decided that he didn&#x27;t want to be a manager after the acquisition and stepped down to a low demanding role.<p>The problem is that this person is really bad in his new role and he&#x27;s not interested in getting any better. What&#x27;s worse is that he&#x27;s making errors that affect the entire team and might get the team fired and the errors seem to be on purpose. When he gets confronted with making obvious errors, he makes up an excuse like that the instruction weren&#x27;t clear when everyone else understood them well. Sometimes he disappears from his workplace for a couple of hours to talk with the other former co-founders or do other things. During our team meetings, he mostly occupied with his phone and seem to be absent. When we meet with our new owners, he&#x27;s very fast talking about the difficulties that the team has and that makes the team&#x27;s efficiency bad, most of the things are issues that he has. The new owners are located in a different location so they can&#x27;t see his bad behavior, in fact they trust him as one of the better members in the team since he used to be the co-founder and are listening more to him than his new boss.<p>We can&#x27;t figure out a reason for his behavior rather than that he has a contract that prevents him from being fired without heavily compensation (we have verified this to be true). So he is much better off if the team is shut-down since he will get compensated without having to work. No one is telling about his behavior to our new owners for one reason, he and the other former co-founders are really tight buddies and they will make sure that we&#x27;ll have difficulties finding other jobs in the future if this gets out. I&#x27;m not sure what to do, but he is making everyone&#x27;s job much more difficult.
======
joaodasilva989
Game theory at work. If the contract is like that, it is hard to do something.

I don't know what I'd do, but here's a story that might be happening: Maybe he
tried to do contribute but was constantly hampered by the new owners, then
realized it's not worth the effort and since the "retired".

FWIW, I don't think he's really "sabotaging" the thing, he just stopped
contributing.

~~~
jground
I think he thought that he would be much better in his new role, but one he
found out that he needed to learn some stuff that were new/difficult, he just
gave up and started to make life worse for everyone else.

------
yaur
Sounds like he can't quit and can't be fired. Most likely he is coasting to
the end of his contract and doesn't really give a crap because he has already
cashed out. Your best option with someone like that is to sideline them and
get them out of the way as much as possible.

