Why Marcus Resigned?

Let me tell you about Marcus.

Fourteen years at the same engineering company. The kind of person organisations quietly depend on — called when things are stuck, not because he is loud, but because he is reliably right. He redesigned a critical manufacturing component early in his career that saved the company eleven months of production time. His team stayed with him across market cycles. Not because they had to. Because they wanted to.

Then a new boss arrived. Let's call him Victor.

Victor never blocked a single proposal Marcus submitted. He approved everything — quickly, without comment, without engagement. A rubber stamp, not a response. Meanwhile, he quietly built direct relationships with Marcus's team, bypassing him entirely — assigning work, seeking updates, offering praise, all without informing Marcus. Within six months, even Marcus's most loyal engineers had started scheduling time with Victor separately. Just to be safe.

Marcus escalated to Victor's boss, David. David listened carefully. Then said what senior leaders almost always say: "This sounds like a relationship issue. Sort it out one-on-one." 

The one-on-one changed nothing. Six weeks later, Marcus resigned. Fourteen years. Gone in a Friday afternoon email.

I have shared Marcus's story a few times in my circle recently — in conversations, in rooms where senior leaders sit, in coaching sessions where people come with problems they struggle to name. What struck me was not the anger in the responses — though there was plenty of that. It was the recognition. Almost everyone said some version of the same thing: I have seen this. I have lived this. I have been Marcus.

One person said: "The worst part was that everyone knew. And nobody did anything." That line stayed with me. Because it is exactly the right place to pull the thread.

The question I want to sit with is not what Marcus should have done differently. The question is harder.

What kind of organisation allows Victor to operate? Because here is the uncomfortable truth: Victor did not succeed despite the system. He succeeded because of it. 

He was hired through a process that rewarded articulateness and upward impression management. He delivered results — by using Marcus's team, Marcus's systems, and fourteen years of Marcus's institutional knowledge, while quietly dismantling Marcus's authority. The dashboards showed green. Nobody was looking at what it cost.

When Marcus escalated, David was not a bad person. He was a rational one. The system gave him no reason to act. So he didn't.

This is not a story about Victor. It is a story about what organisations measure, what they reward, and what they quietly permit. I have spent years watching organisations confuse having a process with having a system. They are not the same thing.

A process says: we conduct 360-degree feedback annually. A system asks: is it specific enough to catch the manager who bypasses his peer's authority week after week? Is it tied to anything that actually matters?

A process says: we track attrition.

A system asks: do we track who is leaving, under which manager, with what tenure and reputation? Because Marcus — fourteen years, high peer regard, resigned within eighteen months of a structural change — is not a data point. He is a signal. And signals ignored become patterns. And patterns become culture.

McKinsey's research confirms what most of us know in our bones: people do not leave organisations. They leave managers. And yet most organisations track attrition by function, not by the manager directly above the person who walked out the door. The data to catch Victor exists almost everywhere. Nobody is looking at it in the right way.

When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft in 2014, he inherited two decades of rewarding individual brilliance and political dominance — a culture that made some people powerful and made many more quietly invisible. His answer was not a speech about values. It was a change in what the system measured. Promotion began to require not just what you delivered, but what the people around you became.

A Victor cannot answer that question honestly. His entire operating model depends on making others smaller so he appears larger. In a system that measures the growth of those around you, he has nowhere to hide.

Here is what I think is most important — and least discussed.  Organisations do not just fail to catch Victor. They fail to build the norm that would make his behaviour nameable in the first place.

What Victor did to Marcus would be described in most organisations as a personality clash. Not as a management integrity failure. Not as conduct that falls below the standard expected of a leader. That distinction matters enormously. A personality clash is something HR asks you to resolve privately. A management integrity failure is something the organisation is obligated to investigate. As long as organisations treat political erasure as the former, people like Victor will keep operating — because the environment rewards their results and politely looks away from their methods. 

The moment an organisation names it clearly — that systematically undermining a peer's authority is a conduct matter, not a style difference — the calculus changes. David's response to Marcus would have been different. Not "sort it out one-on-one" but "show me the pattern. This is not a relationship issue. This is a leadership integrity question."

Most organisations are running a game they do not know they are running. They hire for presence and reward delivery. They measure output and ignore method. They call political behaviour a personality issue and wonder why their best people keep leaving.

Marcus is not rare. The organisations that deserve him are.

Have you seen this pattern? What, if anything, changed it? It Is What It Is