Personal Development

Yes, Sir or Oh, No! Toxicity Lessons

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The manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Mysore, near the Nanjangud industrial area, buzzed with the sound of automated pick-and-place machines. Inside the high-precision Surface Mount Technology division, however, the atmosphere was thick with tension. At the center of this tension was Ramanjaneya, the plant’s production manager. To some in the leadership, he was a reliable asset, but his rise to the top was entirely accidental. Ten years ago, Ramanjaneya’s world had been delightfully simple: a desk, a micrometer, and a mountain of incoming components. As an Incoming Parts Inspector, success meant matching a physical part to a blueprint. If the dimensions matched, it passed. There were no shades of grey and no people management.

Then, a chaotic organizational purge hit the company. The department head resigned, senior supervisor took a job abroad, and a hiring freeze locked the team size. Finding himself the last man standing, Ramanjaneya was handed the manager’s cabin for one simple reason, he was a ultimate Yes-Man for his Manager. While others argued about bandwidth or quality protocols, Ramanjaneya just nodded, becoming the friction-free gear the top brass wanted.

Just say Yes

Now, tasked with setting up a new assembly line for advanced medical electronics, his deep-seated technical inadequacy caught up with him. Knowing he lacked true engineering expertise, he personally interviewed and selected every technician and quality inspector, purposely seeking out quiet, unassuming individuals from local polytechnic colleges. In his mind, he was building a compliant team that would blindly follow his instructions, ensuring he kept absolute control and hid his own limitations.

The strategy collapsed during the very first trial run. One of his handpicked test engineers, a young man with a sharp eye for detail, noticed a recurring calibration defect in the soldering oven. He quickly adjusted the thermal profile, preventing a massive batch of printed circuit boards from warping and saving the company lakhs of rupees. When the plant director publicly praised his quick thinking during the weekly Gemba floor walk, Ramanjaneya felt a wave of intense insecurity. He didn’t see an asset but a dangerous rival who could expose the fact that he was just an inspector playing the role of a manager. Almost overnight, Ramanjaneya transformed into a saboteur. He began assigning this engineer to basic component sorting, publicly reprimanded him for minor dress-code violations in front of the entire shift, and deliberately altered his machine logs to make her work look sloppy. Unable to handle the constant hostility, he resigned within a month. Ramanjaneya smoothly told the HR department that he lacked the stamina for the works.

The cycle continued with the next few recruits. A skilled component specialist who suggested a better inventory tracking system was immediately isolated and forced to do manual packing work until he, too, walked out.  Ramanjaneya’s incompetence made him paranoid, driving him to systematically destroy the very talent he had selected. He wanted yes-men to cover his flaws, but the moment their competence shone through, his fragile ego felt threatened.

As the production delays worsened, Ramanjaneya scrambled to protect himself during the monthly review meeting with the Corporate Team. Standing before the projection, he projected a massive spreadsheet of missed targets and pointedly shifted the blame onto the very technicians he had driven away. He claimed that the local polytechnic graduates lacked the basic work ethic required for high-precision electronics manufacturing and accused his former test engineer of gross negligence that supposedly damaged a calibration sensor. By painting his subordinates as reckless, incompetent, and undisciplined, his practiced habit of telling leadership exactly what they wanted to hear worked once again. He successfully managed to divert attention from his own operational failures, convincing senior management that he was simply a victim of a poor workforce. In any other professional organisation a Manager blaming his subordinates, would be the first one to get the sack, even if he was right.

By the start of the monsoon season, however, this strategy began to crumble. The state-of-the-art assembly line sat completely idle, surrounded by empty workstations, while Ramanjaneya paced his cabin alone, the old comfort of his “Yes-Man” routine no longer shielding him from reality. Upstairs, the plant director looked past the polished presentations and focused instead on the hard metrics-soaring recruitment costs, missed delivery deadlines, and a mounting pile of identical resignation letters, all tracing back to a single department.

HR proposed initiating another hiring drive to replace the technicians, but the director closed the folder. The machinery was perfect, and the local talent pool was excellent. The defect was entirely in the leadership of the team. Recognizing that the accidental manager was the root cause of the system failure, the director initiated the process to show Ramanjaneya the exit.

His note on the proposal had just one line “It was time to stop replacing the workers on the line and time to replace the manager”

  • Leadership is defined by retention, not just recruitment: A manager’s capability is measured by how well they nurture and retain high performers, not just by their ability to source talent.
  • Insecurity breeds corporate sabotage: Incompetent leaders view skilled subordinates as threats to their position rather than assets to the organization, leading them to actively undermine their own team.
  • Deflective blame signals systemic failure: When a leader consistently blames the workforce or local talent pool for missed targets, it usually masks their own operational and managerial shortcomings.
  • Hiring for compliance creates a race to the bottom: Recruiting “yes-men” to protect a fragile ego destroys innovation, limits productivity, and ultimately results in a stagnant work environment.
  • Fix the root cause, not the symptoms: Continuously replacing frontline staff without addressing a toxic manager is an expensive exercise in futility; long-term stability requires changing the leadership.

If the soil is toxic, it doesn’t matter how many handpicked seeds you plant, NOTHING WILL GROW. Change the gardener.

The Teflon Colleague

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I sat in my office in a bustling business locality in Bengaluru, watching the summer sun shine hard on tinted window. The harsh afternoon heat was neutralized by the cool, darkened glass, creating a calm that stood in contrast to high-energy summit I had attended last week.

During the event, I had shared the stage with a veteran CTO of a global MNC. When it was his turn to speak, he didn’t rely on complex slides or technical data. Instead, he leaned into the microphone and gave the audience a piece of raw, lived-in wisdom that hit everyone hard, “Beware of Teflon Colleagues at work. They are like oil on a marble floor, they look polished and reflect a beautiful image, but the moment you try to lean on them for support, you find yourself flat on your back “.

Beware of Eel in Armani Suit

As I watched the sun hit the tint of my window, I realized those people are exactly like that glass, they present a cool, polished surface to the world, but you can never truly see what is happening on the other side. The CTO’s words brought back the memory of Sameer from my days at a big firm in Hyderabad. Sameer was a master of corporate soft touch. He never disagreed, never frowned, and always carried himself with an effortless grace that made people want to trust him. While my lead developer, Madhu, would loudly argue about technical flaws in the middle of the office, Sameer ended every conversation with a warm pat on the back and a, “don’t worry, brother, I am here for you”. But behind that tinted exterior, Sameer was busy. While Madhu’s bluntness was honest and out in the open, Sameer’s influence was invisible. In meetings with the others and behind my back, Sameer wouldn’t launch a frontal attack, that was too messy. Instead, he would use helpful questions to plant seeds of doubt. He would ask if the team had considered the scalability risks, knowing full well that such a vague question would linger in the air like a bad smell, making everyone nervous without him ever having to say a single negative word about our work.

The danger, as my co-speaker had pointed out from the podium, was that by the time we realized we were being undermined, damage would already done. Sameer didn’t leave a trail of broken windows, he just quietly ensured the doors were locked when we tried to walk through them. The danger of slippery folks was that they didn’t leave bruises that one could show a doctor.

I watched a stray beam of light catch the edge of my desk and smiled. Over the years, I have finally learned that a colleague who openly challenges me is a person I can work with, because their cards are on the table. But the one who agrees with everything while sliding through the shadows of the office hierarchy is the one who can sink a career.I picked up my phone and sent a quick message to the Team Lead, “Document everything, and never mistake a polished tongue for a steady hand. Make sure every point is backed by hard facts and clear ownership. That is your only real defense against the slippery folks of the world”.

A honest enemy is a teammate you haven’t won over yet,
but
A smooth-talking pretender is a shadow you can never catch.

Detach to Discover

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For a long time, I believed that my value was measured by the weight on my shoulders. I equated a frantic calendar with importance and saw stress as a badge of honour. In that world, silence felt like a weakness, and the idea of walking away looked like an admission of defeat. I looked at the concept of Sanyas, renunciation, and saw it as an escape hatch for those who couldn’t handle the heat of real life.

Burden of Importance: Value is Stress

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’ve come to realize that true renunciation isn’t about running away, it is a movement toward clarity. It is the deliberate act of dropping the mental baggage I didn’t even know I was carrying. When I chose to step into this mindset, I didn’t abandon my duties. I simply stopped obsessing over who got the credit or whether I was winning in the eyes of others. I discovered that it takes far more internal grit to stop seeking outside approval than it does to keep chasing it. While I once thought power was about holding on tight, I now see that real authority is the ability to let go of labels and the need to possess things.

Great Unburdening: Dropping the Mental Baggage

Maintaining a mask is exhausting. I spent so much energy trying to please everyone and keep up appearances that I had nothing left for myself. Choosing to let go freed me from that burden. It shifted my perspective from reacting to every external spark to staying centred in my own awareness. This isn’t a lazy path. It is a bold reclamation of the mind. It demands brutal honesty, a detachment from results, and the discipline to remain still while the world around me is in chaos.

The irony is that by facing my inner self, I became more responsible, not less. I stopped being a victim of my fears, which allowed me to act with actual purpose. When the ego is removed, actions become sincere. I no longer do things because I want a reward, I do them because they are right. I learned that Sanyas has nothing to do with the clothes I wear or where I live. It is a state of mind, the courage to cut away the noise until only the essentials remain. It is perhaps the bravest thing I’ve ever done, giving up the illusion that I control the world to finally gain command over myself.

Action in Inaction: Being like the Hub of the Wheel

I see this most clearly in leadership. We are taught that a leader must be a figure of constant motion, defined by a heavy workload. But the most profound strength comes from that same heart of renunciation. It takes immense courage to step back from the ego’s need to micro-manage every outcome. In a culture that prizes the hustle, the truly powerful person is the one who sheds the fear of failure. This creates a level of clarity that most people simply don’t have.

This leads to what I call action in inaction. In the middle of a crisis, the natural instinct is to panic or stay busy just for the sake of it. We often confuse doing something with doing the right thing. Now, when things get chaotic, I practice a form of mental stillness. My internal state remains unruffled even as I navigate the storm. This isn’t passivity, it is the disciplined ability to observe a situation without being drowned by its emotions. By renouncing the fruits of my labour, how I will look or what I will gain, I am finally free to do the work with total excellence.

When you embody this stillness, you become a stabilizing force for everyone else. I think of it like a wheel, the outer rim spins at a dizzying speed, but the centre remains perfectly still. That centre is the source of power. It allows me to see patterns that others miss because my vision isn’t clouded by personal anxiety. It is far easier to stay busy and stressed than it is to stay calm and effective. Leading from a place of detachment requires a mind of steel and a fearless heart. It has taught me that letting go is the most active, demanding, and sophisticated work a human being can do.

Command of Self

Take-aways

When we stop acting for a reward, our actions become clean. We aren’t manipulating a situation for a specific ego-boost, we are simply doing what the moment requires with 100% of our focus.

Contrary to our belief that control comes from gripping tighter, fact is that gripping tighter actually creates friction. By letting go of ego’s need to control the outcome, we eliminate the anxiety tax that usually drains our energy.

Coming to the analogy of wheel. The speed of the rim (external world and events) is irrelevant if the axle (internal state) is secure. If the centre wobbles, the whole structure collapses.

Dropping the mask isn’t just a relief, it’s a massive energy gain. Authenticity is efficient.

It is easy to be busy. Busy is a distraction. It takes brutal honesty to sit with oneself and realize that the frantic calendar was often just a shield against the silence. True authority is the ability to remain unruffled when the world demands a reaction.

Trade the heavy “weight on shoulders” for a “mind of steel.”

It is a Task: Work to make it work

Finally, living this way is arguably the most difficult undertaking a person can choose because it requires a constant, conscious rebellion against every social instinct we possess. From the moment we are young, we are conditioned to believe that our identity is a collection of trophies, titles, and the frantic speed at which we move. To suddenly stop and declare that these things are hollow feels, at first, like a betrayal of the self. It is a lonely path because the world rarely rewards silence; it rewards the noise of the hustle. Staying still while everyone else is running requires a level of internal courage that most will never tap into, as it forces us to confront the very fears and insecurities we usually hide behind a busy schedule.

The true challenge lies in the fact that this isn’t a one-time decision, but a thousand small battles fought every single day. It is the discipline to stay calm when a crisis hits, the strength to let a slight go unanswered, and the willpower to work toward a goal without letting the potential for failure or success shake your foundation. It demands a “brutal honesty” that strips away the comforting lies we tell ourselves about why we work so hard or why we need certain people to like us. Ultimately, choosing this state of mind is an act of high-level spiritual and mental engineering. It is the sophisticated work of a lifetime, proving that the greatest form of command isn’t over a boardroom or a nation, but over the chaotic landscape of one’s own heart.