To me, the most salient and remarkable aspect of this story is the upheaval among the rest of the team. I’ve found, in leading my own company, that the right decisions are typically met with comprehension and sometimes even relief. If you understand that CEOs are the last to know about problems, especially problems of culture, this makes intuitive sense. You, the CEO, sees something going sideways, you react, and the rest of the company is like, it’s about time you dealt with that!

But this sounds like the opposite problem, where the team doesn’t know that the managers have an issue. Such an incident would alarm me greatly, since I generally consider my team to be something of a Greek chorus, mourning my decisions before I even make them.