"Because the CTO had a yearly turnover of his direct reports, every status call about the project took some variation of “great idea, boss” even though literally no one involved thought it was even a good idea. Or even a mediocre idea. It was a bad idea"
But if everyone confirms his bad decisions instead of pointing flaws out, then they are all part of the problem.
They are part of the problem but they don’t have to be part of the solution. It’s the CTOs job to realize they’re not getting accurate information from below and work to fix it, that’s why they’re getting paid the big bucks. It’s not like it’s especially hard to figure out but building the trust to create an atmosphere of psychological safety is the job of executives and takes a lot of hard internal reflection but that’s what you sign up to when you sign up to do the job.
Viewed from another angle, the CTO successfully psychologically manipulated his team and almost literally beat a working, cheap solution out of them, and will almost certainly get full credit for this victory done on the backs of others. SO, was he truly not competent? Or was he extremely, dangerously competent?
Not only that, but while the CTO is busy counting his bonus money and accepting his new shares of equity from a satisfied performance condition, he managed to get the rest of the team to simply be proud of doing it for a pat on the back and the feeling of doing "live theater" or whatever.
"But you also want to feel like a rock star when all your hard work hits real users for the first time and you feel that thrill of I did that. People like what I did. I overcame the impossible."
I read that in two ways.
1. The CTO / management let that fly, instead of reflecting and challenging people when they repeated receive nothing but agreement.
2. People were apathetic, which means they weren't really engaged in meetings, which means the meetings were the wrong format shouldn't have been happening.
Good companies encourage engagement (say the uncomfortable thing), empowerment (servant-leader), and reality (if anything is said that's not true, say something).
Nobody is going to give you the truth anymore — as A) it seems you can't handle it anyways and B) there is no incentive for them to give you the truth while there are many incentives to not give you the truth.
This is just bad leadership. The most important thing to make good decisions is correct and meaningful information. If you punish people for telling you things that you don't want to see, you will from now on never have a good picture of what is going on. Good luck making decisions that way.
And this isn't even rocket science, it is basic common sense.
"If you punish people for telling you things that you don't want to see"
It is implied, but I rather see direct evidence of a culture of yes saying and grumbling behind the back, something I learned to hate. Most people in reality do not face a existential crisis, if they speak up and the boss gets mad. It might cause inconvenience, but this is already enough for many to just nod along and venting out that frustration later. And wondering why nothing ever changes.
Those things work both ways.
The main thing a boss can do is ensure the incentives for the behavior you want to see are there and there are disincentives for behavior you don't want to see. And with this over time corporate culture can be changed. But the peculiar thing is that you are part of corporate culture, and a part with special reach and importance — so you better act as you say.
And this is rarely the case.
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
If I'm in that position, my first priority is keeping my job. Correcting my boss in a culture where they are not accustomed to that is not helpful to job security.
Also CTOs (especially in supposed F500 companies like presented here) don't typically drive the project execution and interact with the development team in a more than cursory basis. THis is another reason I'm super-skeptical of the entire story. The smallest company on the current list is over 16K employees.
Yet another red flag entry. Employee turnover should not be this high. It should be the #1 metric for detecting bad managers.