For six months I couldn't let one person go. I felt sorry for him
A story about an employee I was defending from being fired, while the team around him was slowly burning out. How I was wrong, and what I now check at the first meeting.
His name wasn't Kirill, but let's say it was. Kirill worked on a team I was consulting at the time, a mid-level product manager. One year at the company. Before that, three years in an adjacent role at a neighbouring business.
Kirill came across as the ideal employee. Polite, soft-spoken, smiled. Always knew the agenda. Never interrupted. When asked something, he would nod gently, say "yes, I understand," and begin unpacking the topic — carefully, with caveats, with clarifications. It looked like competence.
After six months I began to notice something strange about this team. People were tired. Not from workload — the load was average. From meetings. Meetings that didn't end. Meetings that always needed to be continued. Meetings where something was "being aligned," but never got fully aligned.
I started looking more closely. It turned out that in 80% of those meetings there was Kirill. And 80% of the overrun came from Kirill asking follow-up questions. Careful questions. Polite. "Did you consider Y when discussing X?" "I agree, but I have one reservation." "Can I clarify one detail?"
It wasn't sabotage. Kirill wasn't doing it on purpose. It was his default form of being in the world. When I finally figured this out, I told the CEO: "Kirill needs to go." The CEO said: "Are you kidding. He's so diligent."
We let him go four months later, when three people from his team had quit — one after another, over six weeks. They all, in the exit interview, said roughly the same thing: "I can't work in that atmosphere." By "atmosphere" they meant Kirill, though none of them said his name.
After his departure the atmosphere recovered in three weeks. Not in six months. Not in a year. Three weeks. That's everything you need to know about the cost of the mistake I couldn't get the CEO to make in time.
Since then, in every new team I work with as an outsider, I look for Kirill. I learned how. Kirill isn't one-per-company — that person exists in any team over five people. Sometimes there are two. They don't shout, sabotage, or steal. They offload friction onto others, and so delicately that even the victims can't always articulate what's happening.
The good news is that they don't hide. They give off signals from day one. The bad news is that you've trained yourself not to see them, because "they're trying hard."
Seven signals I now track. In the order they usually arrive.
One — questions that have already been answered.
The person asks at the fifth meeting about what was discussed at the four previous ones. Not because they're stupid — because they didn't read, and don't plan to. They're offloading the retelling work onto you. This is symmetric sabotage: they don't carry the load, you spend ten minutes re-explaining what was already said.
Two — the passive voice.
"It was decided…" "It so happened that…" "The task couldn't be completed because…" The subject of the action vanishes. That's not stylistic. It's how you separate responsibility from a name. Compare:
"I didn't finish because I got pulled to another task" — there's an "I."
"It couldn't be finished due to priorities" — no one's left.
Kirill had a memorable one: "following the discussion, it was decided to postpone." Decided by whom?
Three — "I agree, but…"
Any agreement followed by "but" is disagreement wrapped in diplomacy. Healthy people occasionally do this. A parasite does it by default. Nothing moves, because everything is "agreed, but…"
Four — lots of emotion at standup.
Status turns into mini-drama. "Yesterday was impossible, I barely survived, I'll try today but I'm not sure." In reality — three commits for the week, zero tickets closed. Emotion replaces output.
Five — crisis authorship.
A parasite rarely starts a problem but often happens to be near when it's discovered. They sincerely consider this a contribution: "I noticed that…". Noticed, yes. Fixed by whom? Check the commits, if they're an engineer. The CRM, if they're a salesperson. The inbox, if they're a PM. The name of the fixer, as a rule, doesn't match the name of the noticer.
Six — meetings stretch.
A discussion that should have taken fifteen minutes unexpectedly runs to fifty. Why? Because a parasite is comfortable in the process, not in the result. They don't want the meeting to end. The next step would be work, and work is uncomfortable.
Seven — manager mirroring.
Repeats your phrasing, your vocabulary, your priorities — without substance. "Yes, it matters that we're customer-focused." Great. What specifically did you do that was customer-focused this week? Silence. Or another paraphrase of your own phrase in slightly different words.
What to do when you've seen the pattern.
The goal isn't to save the parasite. The goal is to protect the rest of the team, who do the work and don't complain.
Every month you tolerate a parasite, you pay in the loyalty of the non-toxic people. That's a real currency. You can count it. With Kirill, the cost was three employees who quit. They cost the company roughly six months of productivity each — that's how long it takes to recover after a good mid-level. Plus six salaries to hire and onboard a replacement.
I later looked at that number. Keeping Kirill was three times more expensive than firing him at the first signs. And that's just money. In team morale — ten times more.
Since then I have a simple rule. When I see three or more of the seven signals in an employee, and they don't go away over a month, I tell the leader. Not always at once. Sometimes after a week. Sometimes — head-on at the first meeting. Depends on how much we already trust each other.
It's an uncomfortable conversation. But it has to happen. Because the next three who quit don't quit because of the parasite. They quit because you tolerate him. They see it. And they remember.