This could be you. Right now, in your business.
A member of ours reached out recently with a story that should make every leader sit up.
Within 48 hours of starting a new role, the CFO pulled him aside and said it straight: your direct report is popular. If he walks, it's on you.
Stop and ask yourself: what would you have done in that moment? You're brand new. You don't have the political capital yet. And you've just been told, before you've even found the toilets, that someone else's mistake is about to become your problem.
He did it right. Invested in the guy. Trained him. Gave him real chances. Kept HR in the loop every single step. When performance didn't improve, he did what any serious leader does: a PIP. Not a punishment, a path back.
24 hours later, a grievance was filed against him. The office turned on him. He lost the role.
Here's the part that should really bother you: the business never shared a shred of evidence with him during the process. Not one document, not one specific allegation he could actually respond to. The mind was made up before it started. He'd upset someone popular, and that was the whole case. And here's the harder truth: even if he'd somehow won the grievance, his capital in that business was already gone. Once you've annoyed the most popular person in the room, the outcome is decided long before the process even pretends to be fair.
The business protected itself. It protected its people. It even tried to keep the direct report on afterwards, but he left anyway. So after all of that, the business was left starting from zero, paying out thousands in recruitment costs to replace the very person they'd sided against him for.
No one won. They just paid for it.
Here's the twist: the business brought our member back almost immediately, as a contractor, to keep things running until they found his replacement. Think about that for a second. They couldn't keep him as an employee through the politics, but they trusted him enough to keep paying him to do the job. That tells you everything about where the truth actually sat.
Ask yourself this: if you raised a PIP with one of your team tomorrow, are you confident the business would back you with actual evidence, or would popularity win the room before the facts even got a hearing?
That's exactly what happened here. The CFO knew there was a problem before our member even started. And the business let it land on someone else anyway.
The CFO has since left the business. Whatever happened internally, it clearly wasn't tolerated once it came to light. And it was the eventual replacement who reached out to our member directly, after he'd moved on, asking for help, because he was facing the exact same toxic culture our member had warned about all along. Two different people. Same pattern. That's the vindication right there.
So genuinely, no one won. Not our member, not the direct report, not the CFO, not the business. Everyone lost something they didn't need to, and the business paid for the privilege of finding that out the hard way.
So here's the question worth sitting with: if your most popular team member started underperforming tomorrow, would your business back the person managing them with actual evidence, or would it look for someone else to blame?
Popularity over competence has a cost. The only question is who pays it.