“I am disappointed in all of you”, were the first words the new head of engineering said to the team hastily assembled that Monday morning. “In fact the code you have written is so bad, so amateur, that I could have personally written a better version over the weekend. I should fire all of you.” The room was stunned. It didn’t matter that the accusations were unfounded. This leader had been given his role by the founder/CEO and everyone knew his word was law.

What happened over the next few months was even more shocking. I watched as teams that had been easy to work with before became incredibly difficult to collaborate with. In fact, some of the teams began to undercut each other. The focus quickly shifted from solving customer needs to survival mode. And survival seemed to include doing “evil” to other teams.

Years later I read the book The Lucifer Effect by Phillip Zimbardo. It sought to explain why good people sometimes do evil. As I studied the examples in the book, I began to understand more fully the dynamics this leader had set in motion that caused seemingly good teams to do “evil” things.

In 1971, the author had led the famous Stanford Prison Experiment¹. It took student volunteers and assigned them to be either “guards” or “prisoners” in a mock prison at Stanford. The book detailed the ways these students took on the roles in a more dramatic fashion than expected. Guards became violent. Prisoners became depressed. The experiment only lasted 6 days before being abandoned. Seemingly good people had started acting in quite nasty ways to one another.

The book also looked into the details behind the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as other episodes of people suddenly acting out in evil ways. How could people that were good neighbors one day, suddenly become enemies the next? 

These are the two lessons I took away from the book as applied to teams:

1. Teams do bad things when they are incentivized to dehumanize others and forced to protect themselves. Without realizing it, they become part of a game and the game mechanics drive their behavior.
2. Heroes arise when a team member takes their cues from a higher moral code. They play a different game. They are able to find the courage to avoid the bad behaviors.

Dehumanization leads to evil

I saw this happen later when another engineering manager I worked for suddenly took an interest in firing someone on my team. Instead of talking about performance concerns or development challenges, my manager focused on dehumanizing my report. “I think there is something wrong with Sam (not the real name).” When I presented the facts about the person’s performance and how they had actually bailed out the truly lagging team members (ironically that this person had hired), they would have none of it. This person was obviously defective and had to go. Of course I told them no and stood my ground. If you fire Sam, then you have to fire me. My manager backed off. But this leader trusted no one. And thus took the approach of tearing down people and always sought to place the blame on others. I was once encouraged by this person to avoid transparency about our progress on an in initiative in order to “protect” our team.

What happened with the rest of the teams under this person? They struggled. Sometimes they would treat the other teams in “bad” ways. Other times they would somehow rise above it and do the right thing. But it was bad environment.

Throughout my career I have seen the “turf battlers”. The leaders who define their success by how much turf they have. They start with a view that there is only so much territory of control and then they incentivize their teams to help them take turf. Team size, who gets the credit, undercutting others, all become the way to win in these organizations. Dehumanization becomes part of the means to this evil end.

Heroes play by different rules

Often leaders don’t understand (or maybe they do?) what game mechanics they are putting in place by their actions. The leaders I discussed above, all built themselves up by tearing others down. They had to create a game in which there is only one winner. It is a zero sum game and you win by beating others. Simon Sinek lays this out beautifully in The Infinite Game:

“If we choose to live our lives with a finite mind-set, we’re playing to win; we’re playing for somebody else to lose.”

The heroes in the story play by these different set of rules. What brings out the heroes is providing them a higher purpose rather than self preservation and dehumanizing others. Pointing them to the infinite game of solving real customer problems gives them a new mission. It creates a different moral code to play by. It gives room for heroes.

Another way to say this: customer drama trumps team drama. Your job as a leader is to put the right game mechanics in place. You have to move the teams from the political drama of turf battles & self preservation to a worldview that focuses on terra-forming. In the business of creating customer products, you and your teams are building new worlds. We don’t have time to play the silly game over corporate turf battles. We can play the infinite game. We can apply empathy inside our organization and outside to our customers. We can humanize our work.

Amazon links are affiliate links. I make a small amount when you shop through these links.

---

¹ The experiment has been called into question as new material has shown the guards were encouraged to act in an “evil” fashion. The criticism states that putting people into positions of absolute control over others doesn’t necessarily lead to cruelty by itself. This was not, however, what I got from the book itself. The book discusses many other situations from history and I think the two lessons I learned from the book actually are premised on leaders “encouraging” bad behavior.