Targeted people are handed incomplete data, faulty tools, or ambiguous instructions, so the failures that follow become documented grounds for their removal.
An example
Two directors of a freight holding company had their own relationships with the general manager of its Southwest region, and the chief executive wanted her replaced with a loyalist. Over two quarters, her capital requests for a new cross-dock sat unapproved for months while other regions' requests cleared in weeks. Her two best account managers were reassigned to the Midwest. In July the regional profit metric was redefined to include a corporate overhead allocation, and her targets were not adjusted. Her region missed plan in the third quarter, and the miss went into the board pack with a note about execution. She had kept every email: the request dates, the reassignment notices, and a spreadsheet of her results under the old metric. She sent the file to the two directors before the December meeting.
Why it works
Manufactured failures make removal easy: missed numbers and project breakdowns supply evidence that strips the political and legal cost out of a firing. Defending the person looks worse, since it now resembles protecting an underperformer. Protecting them becomes costlier: overriding documented evidence and inheriting accountability for future failures. It depends on control of the person's inputs, deniability that the failures were engineered, a culture that trusts metrics over qualitative defense, and no strong sponsor. It fails when the inputs are documented in real time, when peers in the same conditions succeed, or when an investigator notices the degraded inputs.
The thinking behind it
Lee Ross In The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (1977), Ross shows that observers credit behavior to the person and give too little weight to the circumstances, even obvious ones. Someone handed incomplete data or broken tools fails, and the failure is filed as theirs. Documenting the inputs as they arrive keeps the circumstances in the record, where a reviewer or investigator can see them.
Herbert A. Simon Simon's Administrative Behavior (1947) shows that individual choices in organizations are shaped by premises the organization supplies: goals, information, and procedures. A manager who controls a subordinate's briefs, data, and targets controls the premises of every decision that person makes, which is why the contest is decided at the input stage and why the inputs are what to document.
Warning signs
Failures cluster on tasks whose inputs came only from the person's manager: briefs, data, tools, access, instructions. Peers given clearer briefs, working tools, and full access succeed at similar work. Targets or metric definitions change mid-period without recalibration. Requests from the person take longer to approve than the same requests from others.
How to defend yourself
The contest is decided at the input stage, so make the conditions visible while they can still matter.
- Document every input as it arrives: incomplete briefs, missing data, broken tools, changed targets, delayed approvals. Write it down the same day, and send short confirming emails.
- Compare your conditions with those of peers doing similar work, with dates and numbers.
- Ask for what is missing in writing, so both the request and the answer exist.
- Take the record to a sponsor, an independent director, or an investigator before the failure is final.
How a leader shuts it down
Judge failures against the inputs the person was given. In reviews, ask what each person had to work with, and compare their conditions with their peers'. Make approval times, target changes, and resource moves visible by region or team. When one manager's record shows degraded inputs for one person, review the manager.