When Technical Mastery Becomes a Liability: My Unfair Dismissal Story

Promotion and Initial Situation

After five years on an insurance‑core system team, the developer was promoted to group leader because he was judged the strongest technically among eight developers (five backend engineers and three outsourced staff). The promotion was seen as recognition of his five‑year programming experience.

Problems After Promotion

During the first three months the leader continued to focus on writing core code and fixing bugs while the team suffered from slow delivery and frequent production incidents. Business demand increased sharply and a new product manager arrived, causing many requirement delays.

Because of a strong technical mindset and low emotional intelligence, he took on most new tasks himself, leaving little growth space for subordinates. This led to uneven workload, dissatisfaction, and reduced morale.

He also handled several on‑call incidents personally, solving the problems but giving the impression to leadership that he was unwilling to delegate.

A confrontation with his manager in a group chat further damaged trust.

Intervention by a New Colleague

Three months before his dismissal, a colleague from another department (referred to as X) was assigned to assist. X took responsibility for cross‑department communication, product‑manager liaison, and work allocation, while the leader remained focused on technical work.

With X’s involvement, the team’s delivery quality and speed improved noticeably over about two months, and cooperation with other departments became smoother.

Despite the improvement, the director later suggested the leader consider voluntary resignation, citing a “one‑tiger‑cannot‑share‑the‑mountain” rationale. Feeling that trust had been lost, he accepted a severance package and left.

Post‑mortem Lessons

Technical Thinking Dominated Management – After promotion, he continued to take on most technical tasks (architecture design, core coding), causing his own development work to be delayed and depriving subordinates of growth opportunities. Work distribution became uneven, leading to team dissatisfaction and reduced efficiency.

Emotional‑Intelligence Deficit – Under increased demand and pressure, he failed to coordinate the team effectively, communicated poorly with subordinates, and increased their workload, causing frustration. A public confrontation with leadership further harmed relationships and contributed to his dismissal.

Missed Upward Opportunities – Although a new colleague helped improve the team, he did not shift his perspective to a leadership view, remaining focused on individual technical contributions and failing to address broader organizational concerns.

Key Takeaway

The case illustrates a classic “Peter Principle” scenario: strong technical ability does not automatically translate into effective management. Success as a leader requires moving from “doing” to “enabling” the team to solve hard problems, rather than continuing to solve them personally.

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