Take a good look at this guy, because he may be potentially more devastating you your company than a major natural disaster. He is an admin, and he’s not happy about going to work every day.

A network admin from Citibank was recently sentenced to 21 months in prison and $77,000 in fines for trashing his company’s core routers, taking down 90% of their network. Why did he do it? His manager got after him for poor performance.

I don’t know how the manager delivered his news, but it was enough to cause that admin to think he was about to be fired and that he wanted to take the whole company down to hell with him. Thing is, he could have done much worse.

What if he had decided to sell information about the network? What if he had started to exfiltrate data? What if he had set up a cron job to trash even more network devices after his two-week notice was over? And there could be worse scenarios than those… what can companies do about such threats?

It’s not like watching the admin will keep the admin from going berserk. This guy didn’t care about being watched. He admitted to it and frankly stated that he was getting them before they got him. His manager only reprimanded him – who knew the guy was going to do all that just for a reprimand? But, then, would the company have endured less damage if it had wrongfully terminated the admin, cut him a check for a settlement, and then walked him on out? So what about the other admins still there? Once they find out how things work, they could frown their way into a massive bonus and we’re heading towards an unsustainable situation, in which the IT staff works just long enough to get wrongfully terminanted.

So what does a manager do with a poorly-performing employee that’s about to get bad news? Or an amazingly good employee that nobody (including him) knows that he is about 10 minutes away from an experience that will make him flip out? Maybe arranging a lateral transfer for the first guy while everyone changes admin passwords during the meeting… but the second guy… there was no warning. He just snapped.

Turns out, good managers don’t need warnings. Stephen Covey wrote about the emotional bank account, and IT talent needs a lot of deposits because the demands of the job result in a lot of withdraws. A good manager is alongside her direct reports, and they know she’s fighting battles for them. That means a great deal to an employee. I know it’s meant a great deal to me. My manager doesn’t have to be my buddy, but if my manager stands up for me, I remember that.

Higher up the ladder, there needs to be a realization in the company that it needs to pay the talent what it is worth. I’ve known people that earned their CCIE, expected a significant bump in pay, and got told that company policy does not allow a pay increase of greater than 3% in a year. They leave the company, get paid 20% more to work somewhere else for a year or two, and then their former employer hires them back for 20% more than that. By that time, though, they’re now used to following money and not growing roots to get benefits over time. By contrast, maybe a 20% bump – or even a 15% bump, maybe – could have kept the employee there.

What are the savings? Not just the pay. The firm doesn’t have to go through the costs of training someone to do the job of the person who’s left. The firm retains the talent, the talent is there longer and now has a reason to try to hold on to those benefits, and there’s a sense of loyalty that has a chance to develop.

If an employee has a sense of loyalty, feels like compensation is commensurate with skills, and has a manager that fights real battles, that employee is better able to ride out the storms of the job and not snap without warning. If that manager has to encourage an employee to do better, maybe then he’ll try harder instead of trashing all the routers.

There may be no way to completely prevent these damaging outbursts from happening, but the best solutions for people’s problems aren’t technological. They’re other people, doing what’s right.