As a military contractor, I get to work in some neat places. You know what's not neat? Just like very place else, there are asshole bosses. Sorry for the generic nature of the description below – it was a shitty workplace, but because it's military – and recent – it still requires operational security considerations. This was one site among several in this particular enterprise, with similar teams located around the US.
At my job site, there were four of us contractors working on the project with a few government civilians and some military folks. It was a pretty typical setup – three contractors, each partnered with a government civilian for a particular focus area. There was also a contract Team Lead and a government civilian lead. The lead civilian, Tessa, was a real piece of work. She was the Technical Manager for the contract at our location, but she had no idea how to actually run a contract. She constantly demanded that the contractors do work that wasn't in the contract, and not do work that was required in the contract.
I can sum up her character with one sentence: Tessa microwaved fish in the office.
I won't bore you with a long list of her insanity, but here's a typical example of her shortsighted and stupid manglement style: the contractor team worked out an annual tracking calendar highlighting all the items this division was accountable for, who they belonged to, how to get them addressed on time and with appropriate attention, and with all the coordination spelled out across the different divisions we worked with. This was a requirement and was explicitly written in the contract for us to do. Her response was “I don't have time for that. There's a bunch of stuff coming up right now and I need to take care of the alligators closest to the boat first” and she outright rejected the calendar, along with the idea of planning and preparing for things we knew we'd have to deal with. We were doing everything we could to keep “the alligators” at a distance (or dealt with ahead of time), but she was all about doing everything at the last minute.
Then she'd tell us to do something that wasn't explicitly not in the contract, but was close enough that it wasn't worth the trouble to not do it. “Keep the client happy” was our company's mantra.
This was a brand new contract, and Tessa's craptastic behavior went on for eight months. Tensions had been simmering higher and higher as she rebuffed all of our attempts to accomplish contractual requirements, and she tried to layer in more and more extraneous crap. Finally, all four of us contractors got together to demand a meeting with both the government leadership and the contract leadership to clarify our roles and responsibilities. Tessa threw us all under the bus in that meeting, claiming that she could never get us to do any of the required work, and that any time she could get us to provide products they were sub-par.
None of this was true – we were very capable and willing to go the extra mile, but were constantly fighting against the incompetence of her and her team of civilians.
Our contractor Team Lead had already walked a month before the big meeting. He'd seen the writing on the wall and gave his two weeks notice – he headed out to work with some Army buddies on a new business venture. Next up was our retired Marine contractor who was so livid with Tessa's bullshit in the big meeting that – while he'd already given two weeks notice as well – he changed it to two days notice and went to live off the grid with his wife. He couldn't leave fast enough for the sake of his sanity.
I gave two weeks notice within a couple days of the big meeting and eventually found another contract. In my exit interview with my contracting company, the HR rep asked me what company/contract I'd be moving to. I responded “I don't have another position lined up yet, but Tessa's so bad that I'd rather be out of a job than continue to work with her.” She literally LOL'd at that and told me in 20 years of HR work nobody had ever been that direct about why they were leaving a position.
The last to go was our retired Airman, Chuck, who stayed with the same contractor (and on the same contract) but had to move to a different city for the position they offered him. Tessa was such an asshat that she tried to poison the well for Chuck at his new location. She got in touch with the government folks in Chuck's new office to tell them he was worthless and they shouldn't allow him to work there. Tessa knew she'd be exposed as a POS if Chuck had any chance whatsoever to show how capable he was. Fortunately for the people in the new office, they didn't listen to Tessa and gave Chuck a fair shot. Chuck impressed the new office leadership so much in the first few days on the job that they pretty much turned over all the requirements for him to manage, and the contracting company gave him a substantial raise to go along with the new responsibilities. I like to tell Chuck that Tessa desperately needed him to show up at the new location and be a zero, but instead he turned out to be a hero.
On top of that, Chuck managed to throw a ton of shade on Tessa by making his new location the performance standard for deliverables on the contract. This has continued to present-day so Tessa now gets the “recognition” she richly deserves as a shitty leader who drove away her entire contract team and who can't do anything right. Her portion of the program remains one of the lowest ranked across the enterprise during the routine assessments. Cherry on top: Chuck's work is so solid that all the locations have been told to use some of his methods – Tessa's eating crow by being forced to adopt Chuck's solutions anyway.
I said “125% of your team” in the title, right? Well, the contracting company managed to find a new contract Team Lead (Donny) and another team member (Charlene) to work with Tessa. Chuck was on his way out as that happened and Tessa specifically stipulated that Chuck wasn't allowed to talk with Charlene unless one of the government civilians was present – she didn't want him influencing Charlene's view of the work environment. Donny is still there, but Charlene only lasted eight weeks before she had her fill of Tessa, and then she took a walk too.
It's been a little over a year since we all left. Last I heard from Chuck, Tessa still hasn't managed to fill the rest of the positions – the word is out that her office is toxic and nobody wants to work with her. I even had two other contracting companies get in touch with me about working similar missions because of my background – more at the enterprise level instead of at one of the specific locations – but the positions still required tangential interaction with Tessa's office in sort of an oversight role. My response was simple and pointed: “You don't have enough money to convince me to take a position in which I would need to interact with Tessa again.”
Life's too short to deal with assholes like that.
edited because I can't spell