Aleah Callaghan on Mike Rinder

You know, you always have—I think in a lot of different groups, you always have that one person who everyone is trying to move in one direction and they’re just not going to go. They’re just not going to do it, you know? Everyone’s trying to get this thing done, but there’s that one person who’s just going to stop it any way they can, and that’s Mike Rinder.

I was once asked to look into why a specific project wasn’t getting done. And I was in human resources, and I was asked to go talk to the staff and find out what they were running into that something couldn’t be completed.

Every staff member I questioned said they were unable to move forward because of some hitch that Mike had put on a target, or because he was advising them not to complete it, or because he was advising them not to make the deadline, or he was throwing curves into things that they had to fix. But each staff member individually said that Mike Rinder was somehow slowing, hindering or stopping the project from completing intentionally.

I had the unfortunate experience of having to attempt to handle Mike Rinder so that he could continue to make himself employable, because he was burning bridges, he was creating havoc, he was getting other people in trouble. And I was tasked with trying to control this individual so that he could keep his job.

And you could often tell the character of someone by how readily they avail themselves of personal improvement, of on-the-job training, how readily they try to make themselves a better staff member.

And what was always obvious with Mike Rinder—is he wouldn’t avail himself of any training, knowledge, study, technology to make himself better. And, of course, after some time you realize the reason he won’t avail himself of that is because he feels he has nothing to learn.

And therefore, you know, he would take a nap while he was doing the on-the-job training, while we were doing vocational training, while we were doing study, he would very often just nap through that.

This was a common refrain in my relationship with Mike Rinder. He slept and he slept and he slept, and he fell asleep at the most inopportune times.

I walked into a conference room where he was writing a speech and he was drowsy, he was doping off. He, his head was nodding. And I said, “Mike, you know, maybe you need to, do you want to get a coffee or something? Like come on, man. We got work to do.”

And, and he acted like it never happened. He acted like I hadn’t seen that, that he wasn’t really falling asleep. He tried to, you know, act like I had seen something wrong or I, he, he tried to act like my observation had been wrong and that he wasn’t in fact asleep. And he was asleep, like eyes are closed, you’re asleep. Like that’s usually what happens, right?

Well it was really, it was toxic working with Mike Rinder, it was toxic.

It was a toxic working environment because of his own dislike and arrogance towards people who worked for him and his aggression and belittlement towards them, made them—you see, I don’t want to say that he succeeded in his suppression.

His attempts to harm people barely came to fruition because we would always find out in the end, “Oh, it was Mike.” “Oh, it was Mike.” “Oh, it was Mike.” “Mike did that.” “Mike was toxic.” “Mike was sleeping.” Like, so he’s a very dishonest—I mean, that’s just, that’s a euphemism. I mean, to call Mike Rinder dishonest, is a euphemism.