(Business Daily) -- Qn. I have two colleagues at my workplace who don’t get along whatsoever although none of them is able to pinpoint the cause of this. It is affecting workflow and we desperately need a way of bringing this to a stop.
Some months ago, we saw a 35-year-old man who was clearly depressed, and who blamed his workplace for all his many problems.
That was the presenting problem, and his manager sent him to us because he was convinced that nobody in the workplace could be causing the kind of problems he was alleging.
He had worked for the bank for seven years. He was in charge of a large team that was responsible for risk evaluation in the credit department. His credentials were excellent.
A first class degree in Economics and Finance was complemented by qualification as a Certified Public Accountant and an MBA from a first-rate university.
In the most recent evaluation at work, he was a top performer who achieved and often exceeded his targets.
The only (seemingly slight) blot on his otherwise brilliant career, was the fact that one or two of his managers saw him as “a bit of a loner” and that he “seemed to lack people skills”. None of these comments raised an eyebrow and their relevance would only become important later.
During the evaluation of what was, on the face of it, a simple case of depression, a darker past began to make itself evident. The young man, as the managers had already noted, was a bit of a loner who lacked people skills.
He had always been secretive and kept all his things to himself. He had insisted on making sure that he was able to see everything that was happening in the office. He is the only person who worked with the door to his office locked.
He did not want people to hear what he was saying to customers. He often worked late at the office for fear that others might somehow interfere with his thinking process.
He did not attend office events.
He said that those who attended them were lazy, noisy and were mostly promiscuous as the men kept looking at the women “badly” and the women were all flirts! Asked by a young intern why the girls were in his view flirts, he simply retorted: “Can’t you see how they walk around?”. Told that all girls seemed to walk the same, he dismissed the intern as without experience of “these things”. The intern posted on social media: “Working at a place with a strange boss who does not like girls.”
He was single, and had not been known to have ever kept a girlfriend for more than a few weeks.
Once, and only once when he had mistaken a glass of punch with orange juice had he become drunk and “confessed” to one of the cleaners that all women lived to exploit men. He explained that he could never trust a woman because as soon as he let his guard down, she would get all his passwords and she would take all his money!
That, he explained as he went into his first ever (and last) alcoholic slumber was the nature of women. They had not changed from the days of Adam and Eve.
It was after this event that the staff (mostly fellow managers) took more interest in the man. He became increasingly suspicious. He claimed the accidental consumption of the punch-filled alcoholic beverage was a plot to finish him at work.
At first, he blamed his boss. Later he changed the story to say the boss had been sent by the police who thought he had stolen money from a government project.
The more the boss denied ever having contacted the police on this or any other matter concerning him, the more the man felt alienated by the company and all its “conspirators”.
When we saw him, it was the CIA who were investigating his bank accounts because of possible links to criminal gangs in South America! None of his fears made any sense to his colleagues.
To the doctors, this was a 35-year-old man slowly developing Paranoid Schizophrenia. All the symptoms pointed to this diagnosis.
He was admitted to a private clinic (for his own safety – so he believed) and a few weeks into his treatment emerged a changed and happy man, free of suspicion. He was seen weeks later with a girl who he said he liked!
