The Tess Effect: A Story About Toxic Coworkers and the Systems That Adore Them

How corporate systems don't just tolerate toxicity—they manufacture it

Once upon a time, I worked at a company with a blue bird as its logo. The experience could have been a spin-off or sequel of Horrible Bosses, except without great actors. But this is not a story about my boss, even though she was awful enough to get top billing in the movie. That’s a story for another day. No, this is a story about Tess (with a T, not a J).

Tess was the kind of coworker who would pour gasoline on you if you were on fire—if it would help her career move forward even an inch. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean if you were literally engulfed in flames, screaming for help, and Tess had a fire extinguisher in one hand and a can of premium unleaded in the other, she would carefully assess which option would look better on her performance review. And then she’d go with the gasoline.

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The thing about Tess is that she wasn’t subtle about being terrible. She was openly, flagrantly, magnificently toxic. She had the interpersonal skills of a cheese grater and the empathy of a parking meter. When she smiled at you in meetings, it was the smile of someone mentally calculating exactly how to use your corpse as a ladder rung. Everyone knew it. Everyone could see it. And yet—the system loved her.

Courtesy of Paramount

Let me paint you a picture of how Tess operated. I’d spend weeks building a project, collaborating with cross-functional partners, getting buy-in from stakeholders, doing all the things you’re supposed to do when you’re a functioning adult in a professional environment. My coworkers would support it. The people I worked with would say things like “This is great!” and “Let’s move forward with this!” You know, the kind of positive feedback that makes you think you’re doing your job correctly.

Then with the force and speed of a ninja assassin, Tess would strike.

She wouldn’t do it in the meeting, of course. That would be too honest, too direct, too much like actual professional disagreement. No, Tess would wait until I left the room, and then she’d sidle up to the decision-makers like a corporate assassin and systematically dismantle everything I’d built. She’d plant seeds of doubt. She’d reframe my ideas as her concerns. She’d position herself as the thoughtful one, the careful one, the one who was really thinking about what’s best for the company.

Then, to add insult to injury, Tess would go to our boss, you know the horrible one with the story for another day, and say whatever it took to get me drawn and quartered (in the professional sense).

By the time I found out what happened, my project would be dead, Tess would be leading the “new direction” (which was usually just my idea with worse execution), my boss would be praising Tess, and I’d be left wondering if I’d imagined the entire previous conversation where everyone agreed with me.

The gasoline-on-fire thing wasn’t hyperbole, by the way. Tess used me as a stepping stone to get a manager role. Actively, deliberately, with the kind of focused malice usually reserved for soap opera villains. She took credit for my work, undermined my credibility, and positioned herself as the natural successor to a leadership position. And it worked.

Here’s where the story gets interesting, though. Because this isn’t really a story about Tess being awful. Awful people exist everywhere—in offices, in grocery stores, in line at the DMV. They’re like pigeons: annoying, ubiquitous, and somehow always shitting on things you care about.

No, this is a story about why the system didn’t just allow Tess to survive. It created an environment where she thrived.

Think about it. What does a typical corporate promotion system reward? Individual achievement. Visible wins. The appearance of leadership. Being in the right meetings and saying the right things to the right people. Does it reward collaboration? Sure, in the same way it rewards “synergy” and “thinking outside the box”—which is to say, it puts those words in the values statement and then promptly ignores them when it’s time to hand out promotions.

Tess understood this instinctively. She knew that sabotaging a coworker’s project and then swooping in with a “solution” looked exactly like leadership to people who weren’t paying attention (especially to a horrible boss). She knew that taking credit for other people’s work was functionally identical to doing the work yourself, as long as you were the one in the room when the VP asked about it. She knew that the system didn’t reward being good at your job; it rewarded being good at looking like you were good at your job.

And boy did Tess do a good job of looking like she was doing a good job.

And the beautiful thing—and by beautiful, I mean soul-crushing—is that the system proved her right.

Tess got the manager role. There was the congratulatory email about it, full of phrases like “excited to announce” and “well-deserved promotion” and other corporate euphemisms for “we have no idea what we’re doing.” I’m sure someone in HR felt very good about themselves.

The role lasted three weeks.

Three. Whole. Weeks.

Turns out, when you’re a manager, you can’t just sabotage people behind their backs anymore. You have to actually manage them. To their faces. With your name attached to decisions. And shockingly, when your entire professional skill set is “being terrible to people in ways they can’t quite prove,” you’re not great at the job that requires you to lead, inspire, and develop a team.

The team HATED her.

Tess flamed out so spectacularly that I almost felt bad for her. Almost. It was like watching someone who’d spent years training to be a ninja finally get their big mission, only to discover that the mission was “teach a kindergarten class.” All her skills were suddenly useless, and everyone could see it.

But here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: the system didn’t learn anything.

Tess failed, sure. But the system that promoted her? Still there. Still rewarding the same behaviors. Still creating new Tesses every quarter. Because the problem isn’t that one toxic person slipped through the cracks. The problem is that the cracks are load-bearing walls.

We’ve built workplace systems that actively select for toxicity. We’ve created metrics that reward sabotage and call it ambition. We’ve designed promotion tracks that favor people who are good at taking credit over people who are good at their jobs. And then we act surprised when our offices are full of people who would pour gasoline on their burning coworkers.

The system didn’t fail to stop Tess. The system created her, promoted her, and when she inevitably failed, it went right back to creating the next one.

And that’s why work doesn’t work.

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