To a degree I think I did stand up for my colleagues. I brought in the Helpdesk guy, who was my old colleague from Epson days and in a strange twist of fate was actually my boss early in my career. I never needed to manage him, just protect him from some of the crap that fell his way because he was new. And the other guy was fully self managing and whilst I was technically his manager for about a week till the new boss came in, he got in with what was needed and showed such astute vision and planning that frankly I found all I would have done was get in his way if I'd "supervised" him. So I just asked him periodically how things were going, listened to his ideas over lunch, encouraged him and asked only a few questions; he just got everything done and even had a vision for where IT should be that I was pleased largely synced up with where I wanted things to go.
The new boss they brought in didn't listen to anyone, insisted on us doing useless things, broke all the critical Qlikview dashboards, prevented us from automating anything, took copious notes about things that I already knew about and that were largely unimportant, undermined the three of us to the CEO and caused me to burn out so badly that it took me over 6 months to get a new job.
So I defended my team partially by allowing them to come to me for advise, which was largely to ride it out and let the guy make his mistakes. All three of us tried to advise the fool that the things he was doing was literally destroying the business, but when I did 21 days straight with no break, leading to the start of a solution I could have implemented in 3 days max that would have not only fixed the massive breakages he caused in reporting but also automated them and reduced total manual handling, but was then told that a technical change I had done (add a synthetic foreign key to a table!) was completely out of order and something he and the project manager were going to discuss with the CEO about, I took a deep breath, excused myself from their meeting and then wrote my letter of resignation.
The CEO accepted my resignation and told me to leave immediately on full pay, then 6 weeks later my old manager stuffed the entire system so badly there was no way of fixing the mess (he deleted all my reports, I assume because they made him look bad...) and he resigned.
Last week that same CEO was fired for gross incompetence. They are apparently looking at the books very closely, but it rather looks like the accounts sent to ASIC are quite possible wrong. That's a big no-no and if bad enough ASIC may decide to prosecute.
Sometimes bad bosses screw over good people and even worse bosses back them. Eventually though, if you screw over every good person them as a manager they fail, and fail hard. And they normally have the hide yo look surprised when nobody is upset for them when they have left!