New boss removes flexible working with "no exceptions" preventing employee from attending their cousin's wedding, employee takes all 23 days of their leave at the end of the quarter instead forcing their boss to cover for them: 'Two people quit'

New managers come in hot, looking to make a splash, saying more than they're actually doing and disrupting the process and causing inefficiency, all while loudly proclaiming that they're doing the opposite. 

The problem is that the policy they heard in an unsubstantiated "self-help" audiobook doesn't have any application in a real-world setting, certainly without asking questions first and making exceptions where necessary. The thing is, their lack of experience and obsessive focus on "making change" blinds them to the folly of their own logic.

And so, despite their loud declarations about "efficiency," "streamlining," and "consistency," the numbers don't lie—metrics stall out and begin to decline, deadlines are missed, clients are unsatisfied, morale dips before burnout, and turnover begins to rise, draining essential and historical knowledge of the organization. 

The reality is that any inflexible policy is never a good idea. Flexibility begets creativity and innovation, whereas inflexibility is confining and authoritarian.

That's why when this worker was faced with missing their cousin's wedding, they decided to just take all their leave at once at the end of the quarter, forcing their boss to cover for them and causing far more disruption than their would have been if they had been allowed to keep their former working arrangement.