Should I disconnect from a past colleague on LinkedIn when a relationship has gone sour?

Question

Despite my efforts at maintaining a professional and positive relationship while resigning from a job, I've recently been informed by past colleagues that my past employer has been saying a lot of negative things about me - basically blaming me for everything that is wrong with their company. It's not surprising to me as I realized before I decided to leave that there was a significant lack of professionalism and inability to accept fault among the company leaders, and by the time I left I had severely lost respect and trust in the company management.

I'm worried that they will find a way to sabotage future opportunities for me, or even just that they will find any opportunity to dispute my accomplishments at their company. I would prefer for them not to be able to see my LinkedIn profile at all anymore, although I don't want to disconnect from connections that we share.

Should I disconnect with them on LinkedIn? Will that have any effect? Are there other things I should be concerned about that they could do to damage my reputation in the digital world?

I should add that while I worked with software in both places, they are in an only tangentially related vertical to the one I'm in now, and do not consider themselves a software company, so they are unlikely to share colleagues or go to the same industry events in the future. It's more a concern that they would ever, out of malice, actively reach out to people in my network, although I think their tendency towards inaction makes this unlikely.

Answer 1

Linkedin, or for that matter, any Social network is firstly there to help your career, either by keeping contact with someone you want to work with again, or by keeping connection to introduce you to other contacts.

In both case, if you're not in good terms with your colleague, you don't want to work with them again, and can't count on them to give you good reccomendations or introduce you to interesting people. So you don't need to keep them as a contact.

Removing them from your contacts should be transparent to them, and in any case you can "hide" your current company.

Answer 2

Should I disconnect with them in LinkedIn

Hell yeah, they were crap to work with, ditch them, you don't want to sully your name with a dead beat company.

Damaged reputation

Your reputation is everything, guard it with your life. If they are slandering you, get proof, get a court order and demand that they stop. Hey if they continue slandering you, just collect the proof, and take them to court, you could be successful and never have to work again :)

I love this world of professionalism. Don't worry about it, just remember that professionalism means that someone pays you to do work for them. If they paid you to do a crap job for say 5 years, why did they continue to pay you?

As long as you got proof that you left of your own accord and was not fired, stuff them. Anyone who leaves a job that pays, usually means they were not good to work for, or paid less than market rate. We are all adults in this world, most companies know of the practices that companies take when people leave.

If your really worried about employment, become self employed, and let your work do the talking instead of the people you worked for. Caveat of this approach though, is that your only as good as your last job.