April 28, 2026 at 1:45 am

Supervisor Only Wants Team Leaders Handling Urgent Issues, So A Lower Level Team Member Stops Monitoring The Mailbox Where Urgent Issues Are Sent

by Jayne Elliott

Pexels/Reddit

If your supervisor told you not to handle certain requests, would you happily agree to it so you could focus on your other tasks, or would you push back, pointing out the potential problems?

In this story, one employee is in this situation and decides to comply, but the supervisor quickly realizes that means there’s a big problem!

Let’s read all about it.

Only for team leaders and up? Sure thing!

We had a meeting this week and the new manager advised me that the tasks and queries sent on our group mailbox can only be done by team leaders and up.

Since I am only a senior team member, it automatically excluded me on the tasks.

This means less work for me and I can focus on more urgent items on our queue.

But someone needs to handle the urgent items!

So another team sends like 5 urgent items on our mailbox, I saw it but since I was instructed not to touch those items I did not work on it. (Just following instructions boss).

This resulted into having a lot of complaints from other teams who is relying on us to complete their request before they can complete theirs.

Missed deals, payments and whatnot.

Sorry, not sorry!

My manager told me why is the mailbox not being monitored.

Cue malicious compliance: I said since I am not allowed to complete tasks from mailbox, I figured that I no longer have to monitor it since his instruction is that only team leaders and up can work on it.

He was unable to say anything because it was his instruction and I am only following his orders.

Sorry boss, you told me not to work on the mailbox items, I am just following your instructions.

The manager clearly didn’t think those instructions through very well.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I like this suggested response to the boss!