Meet Mr Verbose Victim
The employee assessment of that employee who feels excitement from self-pity
Corporate America offers some fascinating wildlife that you seldom see in the world of entrepreneurship and results-oriented work. In the Meet Mr Series, we meet some of these corporate creatures and their challenges for talent management. The most destructive creature in corporate America is Mr Verbose Victim. Mr Verbose Victim is extremely hard to spot early on, but comes with huge costs for companies in the long run. Mr Verbose Victim creates the facade of being a diligent employee initially while manufacturing a victim story that allows them to avoid work in the future. In addition, Mr Verbose Victim does not feel excited about accomplishment or work, but only feels excitement when people pity him. Finally, he can be one of the most difficult creatures to remove even once he's been spotted.
But first, a fictional story. Because I'm creating a fictional stories as examples in this series, I'll call Mr Verbose Victim in my story Shane. As a reminder, our fictional company is ABCZ Corporation.
Story
Shane graduated with honors at a prestigious university and was quickly hired at ABCZ Corporation. Unknown to ABCZ Corporation, Shane successfully learned how to get results without doing any work - pity. During his time at the prestigious university, Shane was able to use his demographic information as an excuse for his poor performance. He would visit professors in their office hours and spend time complaining about his grades. In his freshman year, he learned a technique about getting As without doing any work: by spending hours complaining to professors about how he felt "unwanted" at the university, they would eventually give in and give him an A. He also learned that he could create sad stories about his family and why he didn't attend class on particular days - "another one of my uncles was shot today and ..." was a common story professors heard.
When Shane graduated, he spent fewer than 10% of his time in class and never received higher than a C on a test. But he graduated his university Summa Cum Laude because he had discovered being Mr Verbose Victim allowed him the power to avoid results.
ABCZ Corporation felt excited to hire Shane because they could show their clients that they had a manager with a degree from a prestigious university. Since most of ABCZ Corporation's clients were in the same technical field, they recognized both the university and the degree. That "degree" was supposed to be a signal that Shane had a high level of experience, since it was known for being difficult. But neither ABCZ Corporation nor its clients knew that Shane had hacked the system by being Mr Verbose Victim.
Shane's first decision as the manager was to use a SQL platform, DuhQL, that no one at the company knew or were aware existed. In addition, when human resources assisted Shane with recruiting talent for his team, none of the developers Shane interviewed knew of DuhQL either. While human resources found this peculiar, they never discussed this with Shane. In one interview, one of the developers, John, asked Shane how DuhQL allowed automation of the company's data, as this would assist in easy scaling as ABCZ Corporation added clients. Shane didn't know, nor did Shane even have a future plan to scale the organization's data. One of Shane's colleagues, Rick, who was in the interview with John found it odd that John seemed to have a deeper understanding of technology than Shane.
After the interview, Rick asked Shane about this - "Why don't you have a future approach to how we'll scale data?"
Shane shot back, "I have so many projects going on right and so much to do. Do you think I've had the time to think about how to scale new clients? Plus, I spend all weekend supporting my uncle, who was shot a month ago." Shane's response worked beautifully. Rick didn't ask Shane anymore questions, even if he found it odd that Shane didn't seem to be as technical as his degree implied.
After ABCZ Corporation hired John as a contractor, John and Shane discussed the use of DuhQL and Shane admitted that the tool cost the company $1,370,000 per year. John pointed out that this platform lacked support, failed to scale data appropriately as the company added clients, and used functionality that was undocumented. All of these were concerns and highlighted how DuhQL wasn't helping the company move forward. John proposed to Shane that they migrate instead to a SQL platform that would cost the company $81,000 a year and would come with support the company already had through their cloud provider. Shane absolutely hated John's suggestion, even though the suggestion would save the company money in addition to helping with scaling data. However, Shane knew something John didn't know: Shane used DuhQL because it lacked support and it gave Shane full control over the company's "clean" data. In other words, the drawbacks John listed were benefits in Shane's mind. But Shane had a problem - how would he justify spending more money on an inferior tool that he preferred?
Shane recognized John's technical skill and ability to make moves in the organization that would save and make the company money. This could eventually mean that the company would question Shane's leadership with John moving into leadership - the director position over the data team that Shane desperately wanted. Shane felt John was his competition, even though Johh's goal was simply to move the company into a better data direction overall. Shane cleverly started isolating John by leaving him out of all stakeholder meetings and painting himself as a "mentor" to John who needed to spend hours training John because "John doesn't understand the company's needs." The main goal was that stakeholders would feel bad for Shane because he had to train John as well as deliver products to the stakeholders. It was yet another responsibility that Shane had to manage.
Shane also created arbitrary and unnecessary tasks for John to do that added no value and were impossible. The goal was to keep John busy on meaningless work for the company while Shane "managed" John as a contractor so that Shane could show in his resume he had management experience. In six months, he would let John go under the guise that John wasn't delivering important work without telling anyone that he was assigning the unimportant work. He could then manage another contractor and let them go before they became a threat. In the future, he could use this experience to prove that he had the skills to be the director.
Unfortunately this strategy backfired on Shane. Shane fell behind on the deliverables for business stakeholders and ABCZ Corporation hired an external director to manage Shane. The new director, Thatcher, also found the use of DuhQL wasteful - he disliked both the costs and lack of automation. As Thatcher talked with Shane, he treated conversations with Shane as an interview and discovered that Shane lacked technical skills. This resulted in a political battle, as Thatcher openly disagreed with Shane in meetings with business stakeholders and called Shane incompetent. Shane correctly pointed out that Thatcher was verbally abusive, but because Shane kept failing to deliver to the business, no one cared about Shane's complaints - he had alienated business stakeholders by failing to deliver.
Shane then tried to fall back on John to support him against Thatcher. "Thatcher is an abusive and toxic person," Shane started with John. "I can't belive this organization hired him and no one will listen to me. He's dragged me privately into his office and told me that I was incompetent and lazy."
John felt bad and had noted that Thatcher spoke directly to people, but Shane had failed to deliver to business stakeholders and they were complaining to executives who hired Thatcher. "Unfortunately," John began, "I'm a contractor so my weight in this situation doesn't matter. Also, you haven't been fully honest with me about our deliverables either - I had no idea we had 2 projects due this week and you haven't given me any work for these. In the business stakeholders' minds, we're behind. That's why they hired Thatcher."
"But I have six other projects to manage and the DuhQL platform failed this past week and I needed to spend a few days to troubleshoot it!" Shane screamed. "You don't understand how much I have going on right now. I'm just so overwhelmed! Thatcher is wrong - I'm not incompetent! You don't know how hard it is to manage all these projects. The business stakeholders are never happy." Shane fell back on his college strategy - he was a victim. Like every victim, every person he talked to individually "understood" him while everyone else who wasn't present in the conversation didn't understand or appreciate him. This failed with John. What Shane didn't realize about John was that he measured people by results, not words. Shane's lack of results communicated to others that he was incompetent.
Because this story is entirely fictional, I'll create a fictional ending. Once John didn't side with Shane, Shane accidentally terminated DuhQL preventing the company from having access to clean data. Shane then quit, thinking the company would be desperate to rehire him and get rid of Thatcher. However, Thatcher used Shane's actions as proof that the company was too dependent on one person and that DuhQL needed to be ended as a company tool.
The company did not rehire Shane and terminated their contract with DuhQL.
How Common Is Mr Verbose Victim?
In most companies, talent management may converse Mr Verbose Victim because he's seeking the narrative of being a victim. This may feel as if he's more common than he actually is, as he'll tend to escalate situations to leadership. As we can imagine, this will create a numerical bias, as other employees will be less likely to talk to leadership so more of the conversations will seem to involve Mr Verbose Victim.
The real problem with Mr Verbose Victim is that he's extremely hard to spot early. He tends to wait before he creates his victim narrative, as he must become familiar with how to tell it in his employment context.
Costs
From the start, Mr Verbose Victim is the worst creature you will ever meet in corporate America because their "victim" belief justifies any action they take. When you think about this, you realize the danger. A "victim" believes that anything they do could be justified because they've been wrong in some way, even if this means possibly bankrupting a company (and potentially worse, like endangering employees). To feel a view of how dangerous this could be, imagine a Mr Verbose Victim getting hired at a mining company who believes that he is a victim of environmental damage by the mining company so he takes action to kill miners through causing a disruption that prevents miners from exiting a mine. If you think this is too far fetched, you haven't met enough Mr Verbose Victims yet - they are horrendous people.
But even a minor Mr Verbose Victim will come with costs because they don't feel excitement about work or getting results. They only feel excitement when you pity them. From a results standpoint, pity is meaningless and it encourages situations that envoke more pity. These situations are often the opposite of getting results. In a nutshell, the danger of listening to someone complain (pity) is that you're socially rewarding them to complain. There's no bottom to the amount of complaints any of us can create, so this will be indefinite if it's not stopped.
Once it becomes obvious that your company hired a Mr Verbose Victim, the problems have only begun. Any attempt to remove this person will often be met with significant challenges because you will be feeding their victim story. Even if they go peacefully, don't be surprised if they continue to demoralize your current employees with victim stories about how your company mistreated them.
I cannot stress enough: don't hire Mr Verbose Victim in the first place.
The Meet Mr Series
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Another good post. These types of employees are all pain, no gain. I wish there were a better way to screen for this during the entrance interview.