IN ONE of my previous jobs, I learned that a married member of senior management appeared to have gotten involved with a recently-hired colleague.

I was rounding off three years there, and a series of poor hires had made the team culture quite unpleasant – toxic, really. Several of us were frustrated by how things had gotten. We also had colleagues who were not pulling their weight – including this new and highly-paid colleague – and were instead carried by the few of us who bore most of the workload.

After noticing that nobody was doing anything about our collective infuriation with the situation, I could not bear it any longer. But instead of whistleblowing or going to HR about this senior manager’s lack of professionalism, I instead blurted out something that was a bit too telling to the person’s partner when they visited the office.