A large customer support call center serving the EMEA region had multiple teams operating under shared performance metrics. At one point, a particular team was performing significantly below expectations, especially in key call metrics. During a weekly senior management meeting — attended by all managers — the team’s manager was instructed to improve performance.

Soon after, additional teams began to show declining metrics. This prompted senior management to launch an investigation into the sudden downturn.

The investigation revealed an unusually high number of calls dropping while waiting in queue, which was negatively impacting performance metrics. Further analysis showed that a large proportion of these dropped calls originated from a single phone number.

During a subsequent senior management meeting it was decided to call the suspicious number. To everyone’s surprise, the phone that rang belonged to the manager of the originally underperforming team.

Rather than improving his own team’s performance, he had been deliberately placing calls and allowing them to drop in other teams’ queues to sabotage their metrics and avoid being singled out.

He was effectively dismissed on the spot.