The Manager Who Went to the Top (And Probably Shouldn't Have)

There’s a story doing the rounds online at the moment. A team member gets a redundancy email. Manager fights up the chain, gets nowhere, then goes straight to the Chair of the Board, five layers above their pay grade. The GM’s decision gets overturned. Role is saved. Everyone breathes out.

The comments are predictably split between “what a legend” and “that manager is cooked.”

Both takes are probably right.

The thing that got me wasn’t the heroics. It was the detail buried in the middle: the GM hadn’t even looked at the numbers. A role with two years of work locked in, a critical skillset, a team that can’t function without it, and someone senior enough to make the call just… didn’t bother checking. That’s the part that should be making everyone uneasy. Not the manager’s escalation. The fact that the escalation revealed something that should have been caught three floors earlier.

Redundancies done badly are a particular kind of corporate cruelty because they’re usually dressed up as process. Consultation periods, structured conversations, careful language. There’s a reason Australian employment law requires genuine consultation before a redundancy is finalised; it exists precisely because “the role didn’t have enough work on” is not due diligence. It’s a gut feeling with a letterhead.

I’ve been around enough restructures to know how they usually go. Someone senior decides a number. That number gets handed down. Managers are told to make it work. Half the time the people making the list don’t know what half the roles actually do. They’re looking at headcount and salary bands, not at the two years of institutional knowledge sitting in one person’s head.

The team member in this story is apparently bitter, and fair enough. Even if the role is saved, she now knows exactly where she sits in the organisation’s priorities. That’s not something you unknow. One person in the comments put it well: the toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. Another suggested the whole team should be quietly updating their CVs. That’s probably sensible advice.

The manager, though. That’s the genuinely complicated part. Going to the Chair of the Board is either the bravest or the most professionally reckless thing you can do, and the difference between those two things often comes down to factors you can’t control. The Chair was apparently furious at the GM, which helped. But that could just as easily have gone the other way. A lot of people in the comments think the manager has bought themselves a slow-moving problem. One decent restructure away from being on the list themselves.

I don’t know if the story is entirely accurate. Some of the details are a bit neat. But the underlying dynamics feel real, because I’ve seen versions of them. The arbitrary call from someone too far removed to understand the work. The manager caught between loyalty to their team and the limits of what the structure will tolerate. The team member left holding the consequences of someone else’s poor judgement.

What actually bothers me is the single point of failure thing. One person. Two years of critical work. No redundancy in the knowledge, only in the role. That’s not a people problem, that’s a planning problem, and it predates whatever sparked the redundancy process. If the organisation had genuinely collapsed without this one person, that’s a structural failure that existed long before the email went out.

The manager did something most people wouldn’t. Whether it was wise is a different question. The team might be technically stable, but stability and safety aren’t the same thing. Not after something like this.