The 48 Laws of Power in Practice

**Law 15: Crush your enemy totally.

You must destroy your enemies completely so that they cannot take revenge upon you later.

Application:

In war, you must crush your enemy and obliterate their armies. When you have a political rival, you must destroy their public support and ensure they are not able to rise to power.

However, most of us are not at war or running for political office. In the present day, you can interpret it as neutralizing someone's power in a group or cutting ties with them completely. If you want to see how this works, just watch an episode of The Bachelor. How each person gets eliminated is not just about winning the competition but also social defeat. Then if you watch the Real Housewives, you can see the result of not crushing enemies fully; they keep reappearing and causing havoc in your life later.

Second chance, one too many...

It feels terrible to fire someone. The whole process is very stressful, and not at all empowering like on "The Apprentice" TV show.

There was an unreliable employee in my department who also had an attitude problem, let's call her R. One time, R had an altercation with her manager in the conference room. I could hear her shouting, and so did the whole office.

Later I saw her manager crying about it. She shared with me what happened. The manager had gently pointed out a work mistake that R made which cost the company money.  R became immediately angry and loud. At one point, R turned to her manager and pumped her hands in front of her chest, shouting "what!?", which is what I'm used to seeing if someone wants to start a fistfight on the street.

Instead of firing the employee, however, somehow it was decided that it would be better to give her another chance with a different manager. After all, she had been there for years.

This is how she became my problem.

The first 3 months when R reported to me, she mostly did her work and would compliment me all the time for some reason. Later I realized it was because we all sat in the same pod, and she wanted her former manager to hear it. Then things deteriorated. There became unplanned absences almost every week, causing the rest of the team to take on extra work. When she was at work, she chatted loudly with people at her desk for hours each day which made it extremely hard for the team to be productive. As a result, she made a lot of careless mistakes, while complaining about having too much work even though she wasn't using her time productively. I pulled her aside to talk to her about it one day. From that moment on, I became the enemy in her eyes.

After that, she would insult me in a different language to other co-workers in front of my face. Or she'd walk out and slam the door middle of our conversations. Worst of all, R was easily triggered and did not just take it out on me. Everyone on the team became a victim of her mood swings at different points. She even tried to get people in trouble with HR, when she had been the aggressor. At that point, she began cozying up to her former manager and was now complimenting her in front of me.

HR suggested we go through the long process of documenting her behavior. (FYI, this is months of hell, and I don't recommend it. If someone is causing problems and their heart's not in the work, this is incredibly painful and a waste of time for everyone.) It was a drawn-out process of verbal warnings, written warnings, and corrective actions, to document all the fireable offenses. Finally, after months of stressful days and sleepless nights, there was enough information.

I was then given a choice. I could either fire R or transfer her to their previous manager (who was now on her good side and was ready to take her back). I could not believe the latter was even on the table. After I fired R, the other manager blamed me for being cruel. But the morale in our department literally transformed after she was gone, so I knew I made the right choice.