I. The Familiar Figure

Over more than a decade of HR practice across Bangladesh and Australia, working principally within banks and other financial services organisations, I have observed one behavioural pattern with such regularity that it has become, for me, a near-predictable feature of organisational life. It appears most vividly in smaller financial firms, those with staff strengths between 200 and 2k, where proximity is high, roles intersect constantly, and every decision carries reputational weight.

This article is concerned not with any particular individual but with a recognisable archetype, a figure I have seen repeated across workplaces, decades, and cities. The archetype sits, characteristically, at the uppermost ranks of the institution. This is not the difficult mid-career officer whose reach exceeds grasp, which is a smaller and more easily managed problem. This is a figure whose rank already commands one of the largest portfolios in the organisation and who still, somehow, is drawn persistently towards the work of others.

The pattern is this. A senior executive, one of the most highly designated in the institution, occupies an office perpetually full of the wrong conversations. This figure is rarely engaged with the portfolio for which this office bears formal ownership. The individual is, instead, to be found in one functional area enquiring about matters that do not belong to this office, in another offering unsolicited views on decisions that have not sought such counsel, in a third commenting on personnel matters that lie well outside this office’s authority. The portfolio for which this senior executive is formally responsible, meanwhile, languishes. The teams reporting into this office drift. The objectives attached to this office, quarter after quarter, are quietly missed.

I write this article with no personal animus. I have observed such individuals in Dhaka and in Sydney, and the striking thing, given the distance between those two settings, is the uniformity of the type. In a financial organisation, where the ratio of role interdependence to personnel is unusually high, this figure is not merely irritating. Such a figure is genuinely corrosive. Left unchecked, the individual distorts decision-making, extinguishes psychological safety, and, in the worst cases, creates conditions for conduct risk and regulatory exposure that boards later struggle to explain.

II. The Behavioural Portrait

Let us name this figure, because naming matters. I call the individual Mr. Mir Jafor, and the choice is deliberate.

Mir Jafar was not an outsider to the Nawab of Bengal. He was the commander-in-chief, trusted, ranked among the most senior members of the court. His betrayal at Plassey in 1757 was the betrayal of the inside, and it opened the door through which the expansion of British control of the Indian subcontinent began. The choice of the name, then, is not rhetorical excess. It captures something precise. The damage that such a senior figure can cause is not the damage of the outsider. It is the damage of one who holds the full trust, rank, and formal authority of the institution, and who nonetheless, through overreach, ambition, and self-regard, works against the institution’s interests from within.

Mr. Mir Jafor has a recognisable profile. This type of personality displays a disproportionate and often compulsive curiosity about what colleagues in other parts of the organisation are doing, combined with a persistent failure to deliver against this office’s own key performance indicators. The figure inserts this office into matters that are technically within the reach of seniority but which custom, sound governance, and sometimes regulation place beyond it. Mr. Mir Jafor offers counsel on matters that are the proper business of independent control functions, comments on personnel decisions that are not for this office to take, weighs in on policy drafts for which this office bears no ownership, and is drawn, above all, to files and committees that carry the greatest visibility rather than the greatest relevance to this individual’s own mandate.

The senior rank of Mr. Mir Jafor gives the behaviour an unusual reach. A junior officer who overreaches is easily corrected. A senior executive who overreaches enters rooms by right of designation, and no one present feels authorised to close the door. Employees like these bypass the established chain of command not by accident but because seniority makes the bypass invisible. Junior colleagues in other functions are approached directly, and the approach carries the weight of the office, so shaping an outcome through an informal channel becomes indistinguishable, in practice, from shaping it through a sanctioned one.

Mr. Mir Jafor is, invariably, a practised participant in office politics. The individual forms alliances of convenience, cultivates loyalists, and, when challenged, engages in backbiting and character undermining of those who disagree. Such a senior executive projects expertise across domains in which this figure is, on close examination, demonstrably weak. Perhaps most strikingly, Mr. Mir Jafor lacks the self-awareness to recognise either the underperformance or the damage caused by this conduct. The individual believes, sincerely, to be the linchpin of the institution.

III. The Psychology Beneath the Behaviour

To understand Mr. Mir Jafor, one must resist two temptations. The first is to reduce this figure to a villain. The second is to explain the conduct away as merely difficult. It is neither. This type of personality is the product of a recognisable interaction between personality traits, prior conditioning, and organisational permissiveness.

The Dunning-Kruger effect offers a useful first lens. Research by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in the late 1990s established that individuals with limited competence in a domain often lack the meta-cognitive machinery to perceive that limitation. The mind cannot, in effect, see what it does not know. Mr. Mir Jafor genuinely believes in this figure’s own expertise across credit, operations, compliance, and people, precisely because the depth of the underlying ignorance is not visible from the inside. The confidence projected by this type of personality is not performance. It is the absence of self-perception.

A second lens is offered by research on the dark triad of personality, particularly the work of Paulhus and Williams. Narcissistic tendencies, which include a grandiose self-image, a hunger for admiration, and a sensitivity to perceived slights, map closely onto the presentation of Mr. Mir Jafor. Machiavellian tendencies, which include a strategic orientation towards manipulation and a willingness to undermine colleagues for positional gain, explain the political behaviour. These are tendencies, not clinical diagnoses. Most individuals of this type would not meet the threshold for any personality disorder. The sub-clinical expression of these traits, however, is quite sufficient to produce the pattern.

Beneath the outward confidence sits a third and often overlooked driver, namely a fragile self-concept. Compensatory behaviour, as understood in the clinical literature, occurs when an individual’s internal sense of worth is insufficient to meet the demands of the external role. For a senior executive, this gap is often particularly acute, because the rank demands a level of strategic judgement that cannot be acquired simply by occupying the seat. Overreach becomes a way of demonstrating, to the self more than to others, that this figure matters. Projection and displacement follow. Mr. Mir Jafor accuses others of the very politics that this office practises. The individual attributes to rivals the incompetence that cannot be acknowledged within.

Territorial anxiety is a further driver. In hierarchically ambiguous environments, which financial organisations often are at their upper levels, individuals of this type seek to establish control by becoming gatekeepers of information. Mr. Mir Jafor hoards knowledge, routes decisions through this office, and creates artificial dependencies so that the figure appears indispensable. Status-seeking in such environments is not a bug of the personality. It is a feature of the context.

None of this excuses the behaviour. It explains it. The explanation matters because intervention without understanding tends to fail.

IV. Why the Organisation Tolerates It

A Mr. Mir Jafor cannot survive in a well-governed organisation. The flourishing of such a figure is therefore diagnostic of something broader. Across Bangladeshi and Australian institutions I have consistently observed five structural enablers.

The first is weak governance, particularly a board and a management committee that do not insist on clear, measurable, and documented objectives for every senior executive, including and especially those at the highest levels of designation. Without documented KPIs, underperformance becomes a matter of opinion, and opinion at the top is easily contested by a confident voice.

The second is absent performance accountability. Where appraisal cycles for senior management are ritualistic, where ratings are compressed into a narrow band of acceptability, and where difficult conversations with highly ranked colleagues are routinely deferred, employees like these thrive. Mr. Mir Jafor learns, quickly, that this conduct carries no tariff.

The third is conflict-averse senior leadership at the very top. Many chief executives of smaller financial firms are, by temperament, integrators rather than confronters, and they find it especially difficult to confront a near-peer senior executive on whom their own performance appears, superficially, to depend. The individual detects this and exploits it.

The fourth is cultural deference, particularly in South Asian institutional contexts, where direct challenge of a senior colleague is socially costly and the costliness rises sharply with rank. I saw the contrast most clearly when moving between Sydney and Dhaka. Deference does not prevent the behaviour. It merely displaces it into whispered conversations that never reach the governance layer.

The fifth, and perhaps most subtle, is the confusion of assertiveness with competence. Organisations of this scale, lacking the deep internal benchmarks of larger firms, often read volume as signal. The loudest voice in the room is assumed to be the most informed, and when that voice also carries the authority of one of the most senior titles in the organisation, the signal becomes almost impossible to challenge. Mr. Mir Jafor understands this and performs accordingly.

V. The Organisational Cost

The cost of tolerating Mr. Mir Jafor is rarely captured in a single quarter. It accrues slowly, and then, in characteristic fashion, all at once.

Psychological safety erodes first. Capable colleagues, particularly those who must deal with this figure across boundaries, learn to speak less. They withhold dissent, they soften recommendations, they route around the office. The quiet, competent middle of the organisation, which is where most financial firms actually generate value, becomes smaller and quieter.

Decision-making then distorts. Influence flows to the loudest rather than the most informed. In a bank this has immediate operational consequences. Material approval committees that defer to a forceful but ill-informed voice take on exposures they should not. Risk discussions dominated by Mr. Mir Jafor produce policies that look coherent on paper but fail under stress. The distortion is rarely visible until a default, a regulatory finding, or a customer complaint makes it so.

Attrition follows. High performers, particularly those with external options, do not tolerate the environment for long. They leave, quietly and individually, and the organisation tells itself a story about market conditions or compensation. The real story is that the capable have decided the environment is not worth their time. Replacement costs, including onboarding and productivity loss, routinely run to 1 lakh to 5 lakh taka per mid-level departure in a bank of any seriousness, and the true cost, in institutional memory lost, is considerably higher.

Inter-functional trust collapses. Silos form not because of structure but because of personality. Colleagues who should be collaborating learn to guard information rather than share it. In a financial institution, where control, business, operations, and risk must speak to one another constantly, this is a material operational weakness.

There is, then, the regulatory and reputational dimension. When a senior executive of this type overreaches into matters handled by control functions, or undermines the authority of those control functions, the institution creates conditions in which conduct risk ripens. Regulators, when they arrive, rarely find a single failure. They find a culture.

Most insidiously of all, there is cultural contamination. Junior staff, watching carefully, learn that politics outperforms performance, and that politics at the top is especially rewarded. They adapt. Over five to seven years, an organisation that tolerates one Mr. Mir Jafor tends to produce a cohort of smaller Mir Jafors at the levels below.

VI. Why Intervention Is a Duty, Not an Option

It is sometimes argued, usually by those who prefer not to act, that managing such an individual is a matter of temperamental preference. It is not. In a financial institution, the board and the chief executive owe fiduciary duties to employees, to shareholders, to regulators, and to customers. Allowing one senior executive to corrode the conditions under which these duties are discharged is itself a breach of duty. The question is not whether one prefers confrontation. The question is whether one is prepared to meet one’s obligations to the institution.

This framing matters because it removes the conversation from the realm of personal style and places it where it belongs, in the realm of institutional responsibility. A chief executive who tolerates a Mr. Mir Jafor is not being gracious. The chief executive is failing the office.

VII. A Framework for Intervention

Having diagnosed the pattern and established the obligation to address it, I offer a structured approach grounded in HR practice and refined through my own handling of more than 100 disciplinary and employee relations matters within the banking sector. The framework is ordinarily applied below senior executive rank, and when the figure occupies one of the most senior seats in the institution, the framework must be led by the chief executive and, where appropriate, sanctioned by the board.

The first step is objective performance documentation. The portfolio objectives of Mr. Mir Jafor, agreed at the start of the performance cycle, must be measured dispassionately and recorded. Evidence precedes conversation. Without it, this type of personality will redirect the discussion to the inadequacies of others, which is the practised mode.

The second step is behavioural evidence gathering. A properly constructed 360-degree review, conducted by a credible internal or external party, typically surfaces the pattern in a form that cannot easily be dismissed. Where formal 360 processes are not feasible, structured confidential interviews with peers, subordinates, and internal stakeholders serve a similar function.

The third step is a direct and written performance conversation, led by the chief executive. The conversation must be specific. It must reference documented KPI shortfalls and documented behavioural observations. It must be recorded in writing and acknowledged by the individual. Vague feedback produces vague outcomes. The procedural discipline that the Bangladesh Labour Act, 2006 requires for covered categories, and that sound service rules apply to senior management, is a useful model even for conversations that are not yet formal, because it trains the mind to separate fact from inference.

The fourth step, where there is genuine willingness to change, is coaching. Structured executive coaching with a practitioner experienced in the financial services context can, in roughly one in three cases in my observation, produce meaningful behavioural change over a 9 to 12 month horizon. The coaching must be paired with measurable behavioural objectives and regular review by the chief executive.

The fifth step, where there is not willingness to change, is role redesign or lawful separation. Role redesign means narrowing the scope of authority attached to the office, clarifying decision rights, and insulating critical functions from the informal reach of this figure. Lawful separation means a dignified, procedurally compliant exit conducted in full conformity with the employment contract, the institution’s service rules, and applicable law, and, where the seat is senior enough, with the appropriate board sanction. Both are legitimate. Indefinite tolerance is not.

The sixth and final step is organisational, not individual. Chain of command and decision rights must be reinforced across the firm, and most sharply at the top. A properly constructed and publicly communicated RACI matrix, combined with a board-level review of the true scope of each senior executive mandate, is among the least glamorous and most effective instruments available to a board that wishes to prevent a Mr. Mir Jafor from re-emerging in another guise.

VIII. A Closing Reflection

Mr. Mir Jafor is not, in the end, a dramatic figure. This type of personality does not steal, or defraud, or bring the institution to the brink of collapse in a single stroke. The damage is quieter than that. This figure occupies space. This figure absorbs attention. This figure displaces better people. This figure shapes, by a mere tolerated presence, the unspoken curriculum by which everyone else in the organisation learns what really matters.

The name is chosen with intent. The original Mir Jafar was rewarded, for a time, with the title of nawab. The rewards did not last, and the record of history has been unkind. The same broadly holds in institutions. A Mr. Mir Jafor may prosper for a season, sometimes for longer, but the institution that harbours such a figure eventually pays, and the reputation that follows is not easily repaired.

Addressing this figure requires a quality of leadership that is rarely celebrated, because it is rarely visible. It is the willingness to have the conversation that has been deferred. It is the composure to document what everyone already knows. It is the discipline to act when action is uncomfortable. In my experience, the chief executives and heads of human resources who do this well are not the loudest or the most charismatic. They are the ones who understand that an institution is, finally, the sum of the behaviours it is prepared to permit.

Mr. Mir Jafor persists because someone, somewhere, decided it was easier to accept the presence of this figure. An institution worth its name is one in which that decision is eventually unmade.