The Day I Put My Boss Into Rehab
When doing the right thing is hard and the easy thing is to do nothing
To start my career after grad school, I was recruited to join a boutique, high-profile management consulting firm in Washington, DC. Thirty-five people doing cutting-edge technical and policy work. It was fast-paced and fulfilling work, and I expected this would be a launching pad for a long career.
My direct boss was a senior partner, one of the best minds in the firm. Princeton, Harvard, and Michigan gave him academic credentials, but his skills working with leadership teams gave him credibility. By any external measure, he was exactly what a senior management consultant was supposed to be.
He also had a serious drinking problem. I’d seen it on business trips and late evenings in the office, which happened regularly in that world. I’d quietly suggest driving after a late dinner on more than one occasion.
I now understand this was more common than we thought at the time. A 1990 study found that roughly 18 percent of lawyers qualified as problem drinkers, nearly twice the national rate at the time. The consulting and financial services worlds were about the same. High-functioning professionals are often the last people anyone thinks have a problem because they’re still performing, billing, and winning business. The drinking stays hidden behind the competence until it doesn’t.
He and I had an unusual bond. We’d grown up within a mile of each other in a small Ohio town, a coincidence we discovered early on, and it created a kind of ease between us that didn’t exist in his other professional relationships. Which made what I was watching harder to ignore, and also harder to act on.
WHAT I WAS ACTUALLY WORRIED ABOUT
It wasn’t any single thing but an accumulation of signs and events.
I worried about his physical health first. Untreated alcohol abuse carries serious long-term health effects that compound over time, and he was already showing signs - flushed face, lapses in memory, and unexpected mood swings. I worried about what happened when his professional judgment was impaired, and the occasional volatility I’d seen that was unlike the man I knew sober. I worried about what it meant for younger people in the firm to watch a senior partner drink the way he drank, even though it was mostly after hours or at business social events.
And I worried about his marriage. Common sense (and now research) suggests that roughly half of divorces in households affected by alcoholism cite the drinking as the primary cause. I liked his wife, so that hit me in a way statistics don’t.
That was what I could see. What I didn’t know was how bad it was behind closed doors, whether my job would survive what I was considering doing, or whether the president of the firm would take my concerns seriously or dismiss them as the overreach of a junior employee with two years of experience trying to manage a senior partner.
That uncertainty is where most people stop. It’s where I almost stopped too. Faced with uncertainty, the safe path is to not decide, thus avoiding the unknown downside. However, for me, the pesky Boy Scout oath to be loyal, helpful, friendly,and brave and to do my duty pushed back against taking the safe path.
GOING TO THE TOP
I went to the president of the firm and told him my concerns and what I’d seen. I didn’t soften it or frame it strategically. I just described what I’d observed, on trips, in the office, in moments that had stayed with me. At the time, I thought he would take it from there and I’d be relieved of any further active role.
He listened without interrupting. When I finished, he said an intervention was the right move, and he asked me to be part of it. I said yes before I’d fully thought through what that meant.
The intervention was at the president’s home on a weekday evening. His wife was there. His direct superior was there. The president was there. And I was there, the only person in the room who reported directly to him, two full levels below senior leadership, three years into the working world.
He arrived last. When he walked in and saw the faces around the room, his eyes moved from person to person and stopped on me. He understood immediately that If I was there, I was the one who’d initiated this.
THE INTERVENTION
Each person in the room spoke. We told him we were worried. We told him we cared about him, which was true. The President told him that if he didn’t leave the meeting to go directly to a residential treatment program, he would have no job and no marriage to return to. Watching him leave and stand by his car for a long time before getting in made me more sad than grateful, but I was still fearful about my future because he would still be my direct supervisor.
Saying something like that to someone you respect, while he stares at you from across a room, is one of those experiences you don’t forget, either the images or the emotion. He was angry and frightened and somewhere in there, I’d like to hope, relieved. People who are struggling with addiction often know it before anyone else says it out loud.
The nearly one-month rehab program worked.
Our relationship was genuinely cold for a few years afterward. Civil in the hallways, nothing more. I understood it. I’d walked him into a room he hadn’t chosen and delivered an ultimatum in front of his wife and his superiors. Whatever gratitude he eventually felt, the immediate experience had to have been humiliating.
Then, some years later, he found a moment when we were alone and started a conversation. He told me that what I’d done had saved his marriage and probably his life, and that he’d known for a long time that it had taken real courage from someone who had very little job security to do it.
I’ve thought about that conversation often. It mattered more than I expected it to.
WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ACTING UNDER UNCERTAINTY
I was near the bottom of a 35-person firm I loved and respected. My boss was well-regarded by the president, and volatile enough that I genuinely didn’t know if my job would survive what I was about to do. I didn’t have the full picture of how serious the problem was. I’d never been involved in an intervention and didn’t know how it would land. I didn’t know if he’d get better or resent me for the rest of his career - or my short one.
What I had was a reasonably clear sense of what the situation required, independent of my own interests. Alcoholism is an illness, not a character flaw. It doesn’t improve by being managed around and driven home from. It required medical intervention, supported by family and peers. I knew that, but I also knew nobody else was going to move first.
I also later learned more about that situation than I did at the time. Research bears out something I came to understand from this experience: the old belief that someone needs to ‘hit bottom’ before they can be helped has largely been discredited. Early intervention, when someone is still high-functioning, still employed, still married, dramatically improves outcomes. While writing this article, my research found that the Association of Intervention Specialists puts professional intervention success rates in the 80 to 90 percent range. Waiting costs more than acting, in almost every dimension, whether medical or strategic.
Going back to your core values (not necessarily from the Boy Scouts!) is how you make the right call when the facts are incomplete and the comfortable choice is to wait.
The discipline I’ve tried to carry from that experience into everything since isn’t about certainty. It’s about knowing what you stand for clearly enough that you can act without it. When the information is incomplete and the easy move is to do nothing, your values are the only reliable navigation.
That’s as true in strategy work as it is in everything else. The hard calls rarely come with enough information, and that's what makes them yours to make.
Next week: The Alignment Illusion. Why leadership teams that agree in the meeting execute in opposite directions, and what genuine alignment actually requires.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Haas is a strategy advisor to CEOs and boards of mid-market companies, with more than 30 years of experience across healthcare, defense, finance, social services, and biomedical research. He is the founder of Haas Strategy Solutions, a Certified Management Consultant, former Chair and CEO of the Institute of Management Consultants USA, and recipient of the IMC Lifetime Achievement Award. Mark also served as Ethics Officer for 20 years and holds degrees from Colgate and Harvard Universities.
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