This is the good stuff!

Showing a control freak manager what’s up by turning things around on them?

You gotta love it!

Are you ready for a great “Malicious Compliance” story from Reddit?

Get started now!

You want to be in control? Fine!

“Years ago, I worked for a public institution, where the supervisor was a total control freak.

She was hardly able to delegate the most mundane tasks – and even when she did, she would monitor what her number 2 was doing and give him hell if he dared to call a shot himself.

There were laws in place.

Now, in my field, BY LAW everybody needs to follow 48 hours of mandatory continued training per 3 year span.

The state offers a wide selection of different courses you’re free to pick from.

If you want/need to get your training from any other agency and/or private company, you need a permission from your supervisor.

Now my former supervisor thought that some of these trainings were frivolous – like yoga classes (meant to prevent burn-out) or first aid classes (which according to her, you should/could do on your own time), so she decided that ALL training needed to be green-lighted by herself (which was obviously against the law).

Most colleagues decided to ignore that order, since it was illegal – and we can’t be written up or otherwise disciplined for not following an illegal order.

But they had other ideas.

I on the other hand thought it would be more fun to comply.

So I designed a permission form, where I could copy-paste all information from the online curriculum within seconds and checked the training offer.

I picked quite a number of 2-hours-trainings and introduced a form for each one of them – plus I sent my form out to all the colleagues (around 175 of them), to make asking for permission easier for them.

Quite many picked up on the idea and introduced my form for their trainings as well – so that the control-freak supervisor was swamped with hundreds of forms within a single week.

We were quite quickly back to being allowed to follow any of the state’s trainings freely….”

Here’s how Reddit users reacted.

One Reddit user said this was GENIUS.

Another had another idea.

This reader loved this story.

Another individual has another trick.

Who likes working with a control freak?

The answer is NOBODY!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.