When management starts playing favorites, sometimes the best response is to give them exactly what they asked for.

What would you do if your boss ignored the chain of command and told everyone to listen to her friend instead of the actual team lead?

Would you fight for your title?

Or would you let the chaos unfold and watch the lesson teach itself?

In the following story, a grocery store team lead finds herself in this very predicament.

Here’s how it all played out.

Employees should listen to your friend instead of the boss? Okay!

Relevant information: We work at a large grocery store, and Amy (it’s her story) is a team lead.

Team leads are often asked to go to different departments and help out.

However, because our department is usually incredibly busy, it can’t be left completely without a guide.

Because of this, every day, my department has one of the regular employees designated as an acting team lead (ATL) for when the team leads need to leave or get busy.

Our department manager, Taylor, has a bad habit of playing favorites with some of the employees she’s friends with.

This includes ignoring when they break the rules, giving them more flexibility with the schedule and time off, etc.

She also tends to try to replace the scheduled ATL with one of her friends, often putting Mark in charge instead.

Amy thought she was the ATL on this day.

Yesterday, Amy came into work and asked one of the employees, Sara, to do something for her.

Sara said yes and started the task.

After a few minutes, Mark came up to her and asked her to do something else.

Sara told him that she couldn’t because she was already doing what Amy had asked her to do.

He left, and she figured that was that.

An hour or so later, both Amy and Sara get pulled into Taylor’s office to talk.

Taylor told Sara that she should have listened to Mark because he was the ATL.

Amy pointed out that he was not the ATL on the schedule, and Taylor told her that she had told Mark he could be the ATL.

Taylor made it clear that Richard was the ATL for the day.

Taylor doubled down and said that Sara should have listened to him instead of finishing what Amy had asked her to do.

Amy was understandably irritated by this.

So, she decided that since Mark was apparently in charge of her, she would leave him to it.

She took Sara with her and went to help the produce department, which had been requesting help, instead of going back to our department.

On a normal day, this may have been fine.

However, it was a Saturday, and we are always insanely busy on the weekends.

It took only thirty minutes before the department had crazy-high customer wait times, and things were falling apart.

I had just clocked out and was talking to Amy when I left, and the following exchange happened.

Taylor radioed Amy to ask her why there were such high wait times in the department.

Without missing a beat, Amy answered, “I don’t know, I’m not back there, but Mark is. He should know.”

When problems arose, Mark was no longer in charge.

Suddenly, Mark “wasn’t in charge of the department,” and Taylor told Amy that she needed her to get back there to run things.

Amy told her that she’d be right back there, then promptly told me that she’d be finishing stocking the cart she had before she went back, which was not even halfway done.

I laughed and went home.

I can only imagine that the department was in chaos, given how it usually is on the weekends, and it reflects very poorly on Taylor when we have high wait times.

I guess the actual team lead should have been in charge after all!

Yikes! This sounds like a pretty toxic workplace.

Let’s see what the folks over at Reddit have to say about Taylor and these problems.

According to this person, she should’ve called it out over the radio.

Good advice.

As this person points out, some people don’t care until it reflects badly on them.

This person says you should always follow stupid orders.

She should report Amy.

It sounds like Amy is a little too big for her britches, and she needs to be brought back down.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.