At a financial services SaaS provider, I inherited an employee who was friendly, good natured, and easy enough to like. He was also stalled on a major project, belligerent when help was offered, and prone to lashing out at colleagues when he got frustrated.
That is the hard category. He was not a cartoon villain. He was not malicious enough to make the decision obvious from across the room. He was just harmful enough that everyone around him started paying the tax.
I eventually let him go. He should have been let go before I got there.
That decision is what pietas means to me as a manager. Pietas is usually translated as duty, but duty does not quite carry the weight of it. It was not cold obedience, blind loyalty, or doing what someone above you said because authority demanded it. Pietas was ordered obligation: to family, country, gods, and the people depending on you.
That ancient idea maps cleanly onto management because leadership is never duty in one direction. You owe something to the struggling employee. You owe something to the team. You owe something to the business, the customers, and the organization that trusted you with authority.
Sometimes those duties come into conflict. That is where management stops being theory and leadership starts to cost you something.
Duty Is More Than Your Job Description
Duty is more than your set of obligations or your job description. It is protection correctly ordered.
That distinction matters. Some managers hear “accountability” and turn it into punishment. They mistake authority for force and make hard decisions quickly because quick feels decisive, even when the situation deserves more care. That is not duty. That is impulse wearing a manager title.
Other managers make the opposite mistake. They hear “compassion” and turn it into endless tolerance. They excuse behavior because someone is struggling. They delay a hard call because the person is nice, going through something, or trying their best. That can feel humane. It is often cowardice with better branding.
A manager who avoids a hard decision because it feels unkind is simply transferring the pain to everyone else.
The team absorbs it. The customers absorb it. The business absorbs it. The next manager inherits it.
Duty is not about being harsh. It is about knowing what you are responsible to protect, and in what order: the person, the team, the business, the customers, and the future of the organization.
Pietas is not picking one and pretending the others do not exist.
Nice Is Not The Same As Safe
Nice makes the decision harder because it gives the manager somewhere to hide. You can tell yourself the person means well. You can tell yourself they are just frustrated. You can tell yourself they are going through a tough time.
All of that might be true. None of it answers the management question. Most people have redeeming qualities. The question is whether their continued presence is helping or harming the system you are responsible to protect.
A likable person can still be harmful to the team. That is not a contradiction. That is management.
Help Has To Be Received
Struggling is not the problem. Everyone struggles. Good people hit walls. Good engineers get stuck. Good teammates go through seasons where they need more support than usual.
You help them. You clarify expectations. You remove blockers. You offer pairing. You adjust scope. You coach. You give direct feedback. You create a path back to solid ground.
That is part of the job. The problem starts when help is offered and rejected, frustration turns outward, and the person makes their struggle everyone else’s burden.
Blaming colleagues, lashing out, refusing help, and stalling major work while making the team absorb the fallout are not simply forms of struggling. They are damage.
And when damage becomes a pattern, the manager has a duty to act.
Not because the person is worthless, beyond empathy, or someone the manager should enjoy removing. Because the duty to one person cannot erase the duty to the team.
The Team Will Tell You
Teams usually know before managers admit it. The signal shows up in the work, the mood, who volunteers to pair, who avoids certain stories, who stops speaking in meetings, and who quietly starts looking for another job.
In this case, I tracked points per developer day as a measure of team efficiency. It was not the whole truth. No metric is. But it was useful.
Every time this employee went on vacation, the number went up. The team became more efficient when one person was absent. That was a signal, and it did not happen by accident.
Then the strongest signal arrived: top performers on the team told me they would not work with him anymore. That was the final straw.
At that point, keeping him was no longer patience. It was choosing to spend the credibility, energy, and goodwill of the people carrying the organization.
That is not compassion.
That is misordered duty.
That is blunt because the lesson is blunt. Avoided decisions do not disappear. They become inherited damage.
Avoided Decisions Compound
One person can damage more than a sprint. They can damage a team, trust in leadership, the willingness of good people to stay, and the organization’s belief that standards apply when enforcement is uncomfortable.
I have seen this pattern at a larger scale at a healthcare SaaS provider.
A startup had been acquired by the healthtech company and turned into a division. The division owned a SaaS product, and the product manager responsible for that product had a long pattern of changing direction, giving poor requirements, yelling at developers, and making it difficult for the team to finish meaningful work.
The developers escalated. They asked for help and for a different product manager.
The CTO’s answer was always some version of the same thing:
“They are doing their best and going through some things. Just work with them. Things will get better.”
Things did not get better. A product owner was hired to buffer the development team from the chaos, then left. Another product owner helped stabilize the team, then eventually left too because working with the same product manager became intolerable. The development team deteriorated, the product struggled, layoffs followed, and the division eventually closed. More than 50 people were affected. The person whose behavior had caused so much damage stayed.
That is what misordered compassion can do.
It can feel kind in the moment because the immediate conflict is avoided. There is no hard conversation, termination meeting, or uncomfortable escalation today. But the pain does not vanish. It spreads from the person who should be accountable to the people trying to make the organization function around them.
The team pays.
The product pays.
The customers pay.
The company pays.
Eventually, people who did nothing wrong pay with their jobs.
Compassion Needs Boundaries
Compassion matters. If you manage people long enough, you will lead someone through grief, illness, burnout, divorce, anxiety, family crisis, financial pressure, and seasons where life outside work makes work harder. You should care, make room where you reasonably can, help people recover, and refuse to reduce a person to one bad quarter, rough project, or season of struggle.
But compassion without boundaries becomes negligence.
The kind thing for one person can become the cruel thing for everyone else.
That is the uncomfortable truth managers have to face.
You can be humane and still be firm. You can care about someone and still remove them from a role, feel the weight of the decision and still make it, and wish the situation were different while acting on the situation that exists.
Duty is not always gentle or easy. A manager does not get to protect their own comfort by calling inaction compassion.
Your job is not to avoid pain.
Your job is to put protection in the right order.
Protect the person where you can, the team when you must, the business from avoidable damage, the customers depending on the work, and the future employees who will inherit whatever you tolerate today.
That is duty: not severity, but protection correctly ordered.
Receipts
- Financial services SaaS provider: I inherited a friendly but harmful employee who lashed out at colleagues, resisted help, stalled a major project, and became a drag on team effectiveness.
- Team efficiency signal: Points per developer day rose every time that employee went on vacation, which showed the team became more effective when he was absent.
- Team protection signal: Top performers on the team told me they would not work with him anymore. That made the duty hierarchy clear.
- Healthcare SaaS provider: A product manager’s long pattern of direction changes, poor requirements, and developer conflict led to repeated buffering attempts, product owner turnover, team deterioration, layoffs, and eventual division closure.