Consulting Chronicles: The Day I Had to be an Asshole

Those who have worked with me know I’m super calm. I rarely lose my cool, I always try to crack a joke, and I genuinely appreciate people who surface issues early instead of playing "hide the blocker". Projects are already complex enough, the last thing anyone needs is chasing team members or discovering hidden blockers.

But on this particular case, that’s exactly what happened.

We had a mixed team: people from different agencies and staff-augmentation partners, all reporting to us and all ultimately responsible for delivering a critical workstream for the client. Most came from the same agency, except for two data analysts from another vendor. The setup wasn’t perfect, but workable.

During standups, I noticed one of the software engineers was stuck for several days in one of his tasks, supposedly waiting for information from the client. Every day I asked the Product Manager if she was supporting him, and every day she said yes, he just needed the client’s response to proceed.

By Thursday, I asked the engineer if he wanted help escalating because it had already been three days with zero progress in that particular task we needed to close or, at least, show some progress. His answer genuinely shocked me:

“I’m waiting for the architect to send the email to the client.”

Meaning:
No one had contacted the client.
No one had followed up.
And yet, for three days, I’d been told everything was being “handled.”

My blood boiled.

Not only was this simple task, sending an email!, being avoided. But also the Enterprise Architect they were waiting on was buried under a mountain of compliance work from the client’s architecture department. Worse, the PM had been telling me she was supporting the engineer, when in reality the email hadn’t even gone out.

That was the moment I snapped.

I’m pretty sure it’s the only time in my professional life I actually yelled at someone. The team knew the timeline was tight, our workstream was critical, and the client was notoriously slow to respond. Which meant we had to ask early and follow up relentlessly. Instead, they didn’t do it and lied about it.

Of course, in the end, the task slipped into the next sprint. We missed a feature for the sprint demo, and I took heat from the Principal and even one of the Partners. And honestly? We deserved it.

But it was also the last time I allowed something like that to happen.

Micromanagement is bad, but some team members absolutely invite it.

The next sprint, I only assigned that engineer non-critical tasks. By the following sprint after that, he was off the team. I couldn’t change the PM, but trust was broken, so I removed her from all client communication and handled it myself. She focused solely on backlog and roadmap based on my direction.

It could have been a beautiful, efficient team. Clear roles, autonomy, ownership. But a few people chose to go rogue, and the whole project paid the price. Needless to say when the feedback survey came, I unloaded everything I had.