hiring manager wants to fire my mentor and replace him with me — Ask a Manager

A reader writes:

I’m in a quandary and really second-guessing a decision I made regarding an offer that was made to me a couple of weeks ago.

I work for a company that makes, let’s say, teapots. I recently found out that Cersei, the director of a different teapot-making company, wants to fire her entire design team and hire me to head a brand new one. I would not only be responsible for leading the new team, but for hiring everyone in it. The complication: the current head of the to-be-fired team is my mentor of 20 years, Jaime.

I found out about this when Cersei invited me to lunch and told me she would like to hire me. My initial response was that while I was flattered, I was worried about the turmoil it would create if I swooped in and took my mentor’s role without so much as a word to him. Cersei then told me that if it wasn’t me, it would be someone else, because she found Jaime difficult to work with and was just done. She also had problems with another person on his team, but liked a third. But she was prepared to clean house and start fresh with me.

A little helpful background: Jaime basically paved the way for my career, and I owe him a lot. However, I am not surprised that Cersei is frustrated. He (and his colleague) have a reputation of being difficult and even toxic. I have seen them blackball people for minor perceived slights, and it’s pretty awful. As a result I have significantly distanced myself from them. I retain a friendly, if surface-level, relationship with Jaime, but his colleague and I have had no contact for years.

Straightforward? Maybe, but Cersei also has a reputation — for exactly what she is trying to do right now. She is infamous for working with people and then dropping them without a word of notice, with new hires already in place. She even has a nickname in our industry: “Cersei Fires Everyone” or “CFE.” (It’s not really this, but if I told you the real one I’d out myself.)

After some seriously agonized thinking I turned the role down, though I didn’t tell Cersei why. I gave a sort of “sorry, I thought I could do this but it turns out it’s not the right time” half-truth, which maybe is a cowardly way out. The truth is there is too much potential drama for me to want to go near this situation with a 10-foot pole. I also don’t need the work. I’m happily employed, and I like my current company.

But now I’m second-guessing myself. Cersei is a Big Boss in my industry, and it would benefit my career to work for her. I’m also asking myself if she really is in the wrong. I mean, people are within their rights to fire employees who are difficult to work with. She will have to hire someone. Am I stupid for turning down a potentially huge career boost? Do I need a thicker skin? Though I am not close to Jaime anymore and will not make excuses for his toxic behavior, I do still feel like I owe him the respect of not taking his job out from under him. On the other hand, it’s almost certain he would not give me the same consideration. Am I overthinking all of this?

Finally, I feel really upset about the third colleague, who Cersei supposedly likes but is prepared to axe with the rest of the team. I know him personally and he is a wonderful, lovely human being. I have thought about coming to him with this information. In fact, it’s crossed my mind that it would be fair to let the entire team know what’s about to happen—but I keep stopping myself because I am worried I’ll just make things worse, and I frankly don’t trust my mentor or his colleague not to create a huge problem and/or take it out on me. I understand that it’s Cersei’s responsibility to warn them, not mine — but if she continues her usual M.O., she won’t. I feel terrible knowing about this and doing nothing.

What should I do?

Anyone who’s working for someone who has the industry nickname “Cersei Fires Everyone” already knows their job isn’t stable. So please relieve yourself of the pressure to somehow tell Jaime or his colleague that Cersei wants to fire their team. That would be true in any case, but it’s especially true when you don’t trust them not to take it out on you.

This isn’t yours to fix for them.

As for second-guessing whether you should have accepted Cersei’s offer … stop second-guessing! Maybe it would have benefited your career to have worked for her, but there are all sorts of things you can do to benefit your career that don’t come with a side order of “and you could lose your job without warning at any minute, and you won’t even get the courtesy of feedback so you can see it coming.”

Cersei doesn’t sound like someone you should want to work for.

Given all that, the question of whether it would be wrong to accept Jaime’s job after he’s fired is moot, since you made the right call regardless.

If this were a different set of facts where Cersei was a great boss and you weren’t sure if you should accept the job that a mentor of 20 years who paved the way for your career just got fired from … well, I’d be asking what you knew about Jaime and how he was likely to respond to that news. Some mentors would be absolutely fine with a mentee stepping in the job they were just fired from (especially if they were well aware of their boss’s habit of cycling through employees and figured their own time there was limited anyway) and would be horrified to be the reason you turned it down, and others would take it as a significant betrayal. So you’d need to know how Jaime was likely to see it. His reacting badly wouldn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t take the job, but you’d want to be realistic about how it was likely to affect that relationship and factor it into your thinking.

However, you have serious ethical issues with how Jaime operates and you’ve distanced yourself from him, which changes  the calculus of how accepting the job might impact your relationship.

But again, that’s a different set of facts. In the actual set of facts, none of this matters because you shouldn’t work for Cersei anyway.