There’s nothing more polarizing than a new manager.

When a team has been working a certain way for a long time, disruptions to leadership can cause a huge shake-up, potentially messing with stability and changing things beyond recognition.

In failing teams, this can be a good thing, with the manager’s success undoubtedly measured on whipping the team into shape.

But in successful workplaces, like the one in this story, it can be much harder to make an obvious impact.

Read on to find out how this guy’s new manager tried to make his mark on the company, and how he fell flat on his face.

Kevin Vs The Team

Around fifteen years ago I worked on a sales team and we got a new manager, Kevin.

No one warmed to him. From day one he strutted in like the second coming of Wolf of Wall Street minus the charisma. He couldn’t go ten minutes without reminding us how incredible he’d been at his last company.

Apparently he smashed targets, broke records and worked his way up the ladder faster than anyone in history.

If his mouth had a Fitbit it would have hit 10k brags before lunch, the man didn’t stop talking about himself, and made no effort to get to know us (the team).

Yikes! Read on to find out more about this horrible boss.

At his first sales meeting he opened with a monologue about his greatness that could’ve qualified as a Ted Talk titled ‘Why I am brilliant and you’re not’.

Then he laid into us about our sales figures. We were OVER target, but according to him, we weren’t “aiming high enough.”

We were a pretty nice and upbeat company, so there were lots of raised eyebrows and shared looks – like how do you ******* a team who are airways over target?

Then he was so full of himself he actually said, “I could hit that target on my own. So if you lot can’t smash it as a team, something’s seriously wrong.”

Of course, the disgruntled employees immediately hooked onto this idea.

One of my bolder colleagues said, “Wow what a fun and educational idea! Let’s make it a competition, you versus the whole team!”

Everyone clapped and shouted a hell yeah!

Then as if fate itself wanted to join the fun, our director heard the commotion and walked in.

My colleague announced Kevin’s going up against the team this month to keep us motivated and show us how it’s done!

The director agreed it was a great idea.

Uh-oh. Let’s see what happened when this inevitable challenge came into fruition.

The first week of Kevin vs The Entire Sales Team was like watching a live action version of David and Goliath, if Goliath was a middle manager with anger issues and David was literally everyone else.

Kevin strutted in on Monday like he was about to deliver a masterclass, but didn’t achieve a single sale, or the next day, or the next several after that.

Meanwhile, the team was having the time of our lives. Even our new starter, Jonathan – a sweet, nervous lad who’d never done sales before – was outselling Kevin by week two.

Every time Jonathan made a sale, the office would erupt like he’d scored in the World Cup.

And things got worse and worse for Kevin from there.

By the third week, Kevin had entered what we’ll call his tantrum era.

Phones were slammed. Headsets were thrown. At one point he even dramatically announced this system is rigged!

Kevin didn’t make it to the end of the month – he left because he was ‘pursuing other opportunities,’ which we all understood to mean ‘fired for being spectacularly bad’.

Let’s see how things worked out down the line.

My colleague was right though, it was so fun and very educational. in our mutual hatred for Kevin, we worked harder than ever and smashed all previous sales records in company history.

This felt extra satisfying, being as this was Kevin’s main brag.

I looked him up on LinkedIn recently and his bio reads ‘World Class Sales Director, open to new opportunities’, which I think probably means unemployed for being spectacularly bad and still full of himself.

So it seems he didn’t learn much at all.

Wow. If there was ever a case of someone bringing misfortune upon themselves, this is it.

Initially one might give Kevin the benefit of the doubt, believing that he was simply going in hard to make a big first impression and try to boost the sales figures.

But the revisit, fifteen years later, suggests that the man is actually just completely delusional.

Let’s see how the Reddit community reacted to this story.

This Redditor shared a similar Kevin-style experience.

While others thought that perhaps Kevin’s provocation and ultimate failure had been a devious plan by higher-ups all along.

Meanwhile, this Redditor was joining the team in rooting for Jonathan.

Kevin might be a fool, but he’s an effective fool.

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.