Lynn Cirillo

Getting ahead by going around people feels like strategy. It's actually a tax on the whole organization, and the people who refuse to pay it are the ones who last.

By Lynn Cirillo

Every organization says it values collaboration, integrity, and trust. You'll find those words on the website, in the onboarding deck, maybe painted on a wall. But culture isn't what an organization says it values. Culture is what it rewards.

And in too many corners of corporate America, what gets rewarded is the person who wins the room: the one who takes the credit, controls the narrative, and is willing to roll a bus over a coworker, or even a confidant, to get one rung higher.

Here is my point of view, plainly: ego-driven advancement is not just a personality problem. It's a culture signal. When one person gets ahead by stepping on others and nothing happens, everyone watching learns the real rules. And once people learn those rules, the whole organization starts to change shape around them.

What a Leadership Triangle Is (and Why It Matters)

One of the clearest signs that ego is running a culture is the leadership triangle.

A triangle, sometimes called triangulation, happens when two people who have an issue with each other don't talk directly. Instead, one of them goes around or through a third person. Rather than saying, "I disagree with how you handled that," someone takes it to your boss. Rather than resolving a conflict, a leader asks a peer to "keep an eye on" someone. Rather than giving feedback, a manager tells a colleague, who tells you, slightly reworded.

Triangles feel safer than direct conversation. They protect the person who starts them from discomfort and from accountability. But they come at a cost. Information gets distorted every time it changes hands. People stop knowing where they stand. And the person in the middle, the third point of the triangle, gets pulled into a conflict that was never theirs.

In an ego-driven culture, triangles aren't accidents. They're tools. Going around someone is how you make yourself look better without ever having to face the person you made look worse.

The Real Cost: Conflict, Unhappiness and Push-Down Management

When getting ahead becomes the point, three things tend to follow.

Conflict goes underground. Disagreements don't disappear; they move into side conversations, private messages, and closed-door meetings. Teams look calm on the surface while trust quietly erodes underneath.

Unhappiness spreads. People don't burn out only from workload. They burn out from vigilance, from having to wonder who is repeating what, who will take credit for their idea, and whether the person they confided in is building a case. That constant guarding is exhausting, and it rarely shows up on any engagement survey in a form leaders recognize.

Pressure gets pushed down. This is push-down management: when the ego at the top needs to look good, the weight of every missed number, shifting priority, and unrealistic promise rolls downhill. Each layer protects itself by pressing harder on the layer below. The people with the least power end up carrying the most risk, and the people making the promises rarely feel the strain of keeping them.

Over time, this changes how people think. In You're Not Imagining It, I wrote about how, in a difficult workplace, the question can slowly change from "What is the right thing to do?" to "What will happen to me if I do it?" That shift is the real cost of an ego-driven culture. Good people stop leading from their values and start managing their exposure. Innovation slows. Candor disappears. And the organization loses the very judgment it hired people for.

Why Authenticity Still Rises

If you've watched someone get promoted after throwing a colleague under the bus, you may be wondering whether doing the right thing is naive. I understand that. It can feel like the people who play the game are winning, and the people who won't are being left behind.

But here's what I've come to believe: ego borrows against trust. Integrity compounds.

The person who climbs by stepping on others is spending something every time they do it. People remember. Coworkers stop sharing information with them. Confidants stop confiding. Eventually, they're leading a team that complies but doesn't commit, and that kind of leadership has a ceiling, even if it takes a while to reach it.

The person who stays authentic, who gives credit, speaks directly, and refuses to play the triangle game, is building something that doesn't show up on an org chart right away: a reputation people trust. When things get hard, that's who people want to follow. It doesn't always feel like it's working in the moment. It's still always the better choice.

A Framework for Leaders: The Straight Line Standard

If you lead people, you set the rules of the game, whether you mean to or not. Here's a simple standard I'd offer, built on one idea: the shortest, healthiest path between two people is a straight line.

1. Go direct. When you have an issue with someone, take it to them first. And when someone brings you a complaint about a colleague, ask: "Have you talked to them?" Refusing to be the third point of a triangle is one of the most powerful culture moves a leader can make.

2. Credit out loud. Name the people whose work made the result possible, specifically and in the rooms where it matters. When credit flows freely, nobody has to steal it.

3. Absorb before you push down. Pressure from above is real. Your job is to filter it, not just pass it along with more force. Ask what your team actually needs to know, what you can take on yourself, and what promise you shouldn't have made.

4. Reward the right thing, visibly. Watch who gets promoted, praised, and given the big assignments. If people who step on others keep advancing, your culture statement is fiction. If people who build others up advance, everyone learns that integrity is a career strategy, not a sacrifice.

Questions for Leaders to Sit With

• Who in my organization has been rewarded recently for results that came at someone else's expense? What did everyone else learn from that?
• When someone complains to me about a colleague, do I send them back to that person, or do I become part of the triangle?
• What pressure did I pass down this month that I could have absorbed or pushed back on?
• Would the people on my team say credit flows toward them or away from them?
• If my team could speak freely, what would they say it takes to get ahead here?

If You're the One Under the Bus

If you've been on the receiving end of this, if someone you trusted took your idea, repeated your confidence, or went around you to protect themselves, I want you to know that your hurt is legitimate. Betrayal at work stings in a particular way because so much of our identity and security lives there.

A few things that may help:

Don't let their behavior rewrite your values. It's tempting to decide you need to become harder or more political to survive. You can become wiser without becoming someone you don't recognize.

Keep your own record. Document your work, your contributions, and important conversations, calmly and factually. It's not paranoia. It's clarity.

Choose your confidants carefully, not cynically. One broken trust doesn't mean no one can be trusted. It means trust is earned in steps. As I wrote in You're Not Imagining It, "Real loyalty should be able to withstand an honest conversation." Look for the people who can do that.

Address it directly when it's safe to. A calm "I noticed my work was presented without my name. Can we talk about that?" refuses the triangle and puts the conversation where it belongs.

Notice when the culture is the problem. If ego is being rewarded from the top, no amount of personal integrity will fix the system on its own. Staying true to yourself might eventually mean choosing a place that deserves it.

The Long Game

Ego-driven cultures can look successful for a while. The numbers might even be good. But they run on borrowed trust, and eventually, the bill comes due in turnover, silence, and conflict nobody wants to name.

Being your authentic self in that environment takes courage. It may not feel like it's paying off. But the straight line holds. And when the people who went around everyone run out of road, the people who did the right thing are still standing, with their reputations, their relationships, and their sense of self intact.

You're Not Imagining It is the sixth book in my Musings of a Recovering Executive series. It's about toxic workplaces, gaslighting, and reclaiming confidence: noticing what's happening, understanding the pattern, and finding your way back to yourself. You can learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/books/youre-not-imagining-it/.

About the Author

Lynn Cirillo is an author and the founder of Grounded Leadership LLC. I help people trust themselves again at work and in life, and stop measuring their worth by how much they can carry. I'm over 55, I still live with imposter syndrome, and I write about both because pretending otherwise helps no one. Learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/.

So many workplace problems could be avoided if decisions were simply made with the people who do the actual work. Here's why leaving them out keeps teams spinning their wheels, and what to do instead.

By Lynn Cirillo

You've probably seen it happen. A new process gets announced on a Monday. By Wednesday, the people expected to use it have found three reasons it won't work. By Friday, they've built a workaround. A month later, leadership is frustrated that "adoption is low," schedules another meeting, and rolls out a fix. The fix creates two new problems. And around it goes.

Nobody in that story is lazy. Nobody is trying to fail. The problem started long before the rollout, in a room where the decision was made without the people who do the actual work.

I've watched this cycle play out across corporate America more times than I can count. It's one of the most common, most expensive, and most avoidable problems I know of. And it rarely gets named for what it is.

The Cycle Nobody Means to Create

Here is how the spinning usually works.

A decision is made at a distance. The people deciding are smart and well-intentioned, but they're working from reports, dashboards, and assumptions, not from the daily reality of the job.

The people closest to the work see the gaps immediately. They know which step will break, which customer will be confused, and which system doesn't talk to the other one. Nobody asked them.

The gaps show up as "resistance." When those people raise concerns after the fact, it can sound like complaining. So it gets treated as a change-management problem instead of what it really is: information that arrived too late.

Rework begins. Time, money, and goodwill go into fixing something that could have been designed right the first time.

Trust erodes. And the next time a decision comes down, people are a little more tired, a little more skeptical, and a little less willing to speak up.

That's the endless loop. Lots of motion. Very little forward movement.

Why It Keeps Happening

I don't believe most leaders exclude people on purpose. More often, it comes from pressures that feel perfectly reasonable in the moment.

Speed. Asking feels slow. Deciding feels efficient. Until the rework starts, and the "fast" decision turns out to be the slowest path of all.

Distance. The higher a decision travels, the farther it gets from the details. What looks simple on a slide can be anything but on the ground.

Habit. In many organizations, decisions have always been made in a certain room, by a certain group. No one questions it, so no one changes it.

Discomfort. Inviting input means hearing things you may not want to hear. It means admitting you don't have every answer. For some leaders, that feels like a risk to their credibility. In reality, it's one of the strongest ways to build it.

What It Does to People

The cost isn't only operational. It's personal.

In You're Not Imagining It, the sixth book in my series, I describe the small things that wear people down over time, including "A conversation you weren't included in. A decision that seemed to have been made long before anyone asked for your input." None of those moments seems big enough to challenge on its own. Together, they send a clear message: your experience doesn't count here.

When people learn that message, they adapt. As I wrote in the book, instead of asking, "What is the best decision?" they begin asking, "What decision is least likely to get me in trouble?" The people with the most practical knowledge stop offering it. Not because they don't care, but because they've learned it doesn't change anything.

That's the quiet tragedy of the cycle. The expertise is right there, in the building, on the team, at the desk down the hall. It just never makes it into the room where it's needed.

A Simple Framework for Leaders: The Work-First Loop

Including people doesn't mean every decision becomes a committee vote. It means the people who do the work help shape the decisions that change their work. Here's a simple approach I call The Work-First Loop.

1. Ask before you decide. Before a decision is final, go to the people who will live with it. Ask: What will this make harder? What are we missing? What would you do? Ask early enough that their answers can still change the outcome.

2. Listen to understand, not to defend. When someone raises a concern, resist the urge to explain why it won't be a problem. Get curious. The objection you're tempted to dismiss may be the one that saves you months.

3. Decide out loud. Not every suggestion will be used, and that's okay. What matters is that people understand how the decision was made, what input shaped it, and why. Transparency turns "they decided" into "we decided."

4. Close the loop. Go back to the people you asked. Tell them what you heard and what changed because of it. Then check in after the decision is in motion. This is the step most often skipped, and it's the one that builds the trust that makes the next conversation easier.

Questions for Leaders to Sit With

• Who will be most affected by the last decision I made? Did I talk to them before it was final?
• When people raise concerns after a rollout, do I treat it as resistance or as information?
• Is there someone on my team who used to offer ideas and has gone quiet? When did that start?
• How many times have we "fixed" the same problem this year?

If You're the One Who Keeps Getting Left Out

If decisions about your work keep landing on your desk fully formed, I want you to hear this: you are not imagining it, and you are not being difficult for noticing.

Feeling unheard is exhausting. It can make you question whether your perspective matters, or whether you're just not "strategic" enough to be in the room. Please don't let a broken process convince you that your knowledge isn't valuable. The fact that you can see what's going to go wrong is a skill, not a flaw.

A few things that may help:

Write down what you see. When a decision is coming, note the specific risks and your suggestions, plainly and calmly. It helps you get clear, and it gives you something concrete to share.

Offer input before it's requested. Sometimes the door opens because someone knocked. A short note like "Before this is finalized, here's what I'm seeing from the front line" can be hard to ignore.

Frame it around the outcome. Leaders tend to listen when concerns are tied to what they care about: time, cost, customers, and results.

Find your allies. You're rarely the only one who sees the problem. A shared perspective carries more weight than a lone voice.

Notice the pattern, and protect your energy. If you've spoken up again and again and nothing changes, that tells you something about the environment, not about your worth. You get to decide how much more of yourself you put into a system that won't listen.

Moving Forward Instead of Around

The good news is that this is one of the most fixable problems in the workplace. It doesn't take a reorganization or a new software platform. It takes a willingness to ask, to listen, and to bring the people who do the work into the decisions about that work.

When that happens, something shifts. Fewer workarounds. Less rework. More ownership. People who feel heard tend to bring their best thinking forward, and teams finally stop spinning their wheels and start moving.

You're Not Imagining It is the sixth book in my Musings of a Recovering Executive series. It's about toxic workplaces, gaslighting, and reclaiming confidence: noticing what's happening, understanding the pattern, and finding your way back to yourself. You can learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/books/youre-not-imagining-it/.

About the Author

Lynn Cirillo is an author and the founder of Grounded Leadership LLC. I help people trust themselves again at work and in life, and stop measuring their worth by how much they can carry. I'm over 55, I still live with imposter syndrome, and I write about both because pretending otherwise helps no one. Learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/.

It usually takes less than ten seconds. A sharp remark in a meeting. A sigh and an eye roll when someone asks a question. A "joke" about a mistake, delivered in front of the whole team. The leader moves to the next agenda item. By lunch, they've forgotten it happened.

The person on the receiving end hasn't. They'll remember the room going quiet. They'll remember who looked away and who smirked. Years later, in a different job with a different boss, they may still hesitate before raising their hand, without quite knowing why.

I've seen this gap play out across corporate America more times than I can count, and I've been on both sides of it. In You're Not Imagining It, I wrote that "A manager may believe they're providing direct feedback while an employee experiences that same feedback as humiliating." The same moment lands in two very different places. One person files it under "Tuesday." The other files it under "who I am here."

This piece is for both of them.

First, If This Happened to You

If a comment someone else forgot is still living rent-free in your head, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not too sensitive, and you are not making it bigger than it was.

Humiliation is built to stick. It doesn't just hurt; it tells you something about your standing. It happened in front of people whose opinions matter to you, from someone who has power over your work. Your brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do when it marks that moment as important and keeps returning to it.

The book describes it with a list that I suspect many readers will recognize: "A comment. A look. A joke at your expense." None of those is dramatic on its own. That's part of what makes them so hard to talk about. And as I wrote, "Someone can experience a comment as humiliating even when the speaker didn't intend humiliation. That doesn't make the impact imaginary."

Intent matters. So does impact. You're allowed to hold both.

Why It Lingers

It happened in public. Being corrected privately stings. Being corrected in front of colleagues rewrites how you think they see you. You don't just carry the comment; you carry the guess about what everyone else concluded.

It came from power. When someone with authority over your work, your reviews, or your next opportunity says something dismissive, it doesn't feel like an opinion. It feels like a verdict.

There was no repair. This one matters most. When a leader notices the impact and comes back to fix it, the memory changes shape. When nobody says anything, the moment is left unfinished, and unfinished moments are the ones we keep reopening.

The room taught a lesson. If everyone laughed or stayed silent, the person learns not just that the leader thinks less of them, but that no one will step in.

The Replay Loop

Here's what the speaker never sees: what happens afterward.

"The conversation you replayed on your drive home." "The comment you laughed off, even though it bothered you." Those lines from the book describe the quiet second shift that humiliation creates. You rehearse what you should have said. You question whether you deserved it. As I put it, "You replay meetings at dinner."

Then the doubt starts to spread. You check your work twice before sharing it. You stop volunteering ideas, not because you have none, but because you've learned what it can cost. "Someone publicly embarrassed may become anxious before the next team meeting."

I still live with imposter syndrome, and I can tell you that a single dismissive moment from the right person can feed it for a very long time. It doesn't need repetition to do damage. It just needs to land on a doubt you already carry.

What It Costs Teams

Leaders who forget the comment often don't connect it to what happens next. But the bill arrives.

Questions stop. People stop asking for clarification, and errors that could have been caught early surface late and become expensive.

The best ideas go quiet. The people most likely to notice a problem are often the ones who have learned it isn't safe to say so.

Everyone else is watching. Humiliation is never just between two people. The book describes the scene: "A leader humiliates someone in a meeting. The room grows quiet. A colleague changes the subject." And then: "Repeated incidents begin to teach everyone the rules of survival."

Good people leave. Rarely because of one comment. Usually because that comment was the moment they started paying attention to everything else.

When a capable person starts doubting every decision, the book offers a reframe I keep coming back to: "perhaps the most useful question is not, What happened to their confidence? Perhaps it is, What has their confidence been asked to survive?"

What Leaders Can Do Instead

Most leaders who humiliate people aren't villains. Many are stressed, rushed, or repeating what was once done to them. That explains the behavior. It doesn't excuse it. Here's a simple framework I call The Repair Window.

1. Notice. Pay attention to the room after you speak. Did someone go still? Did the questions stop? Silence is information.

2. Name it. Don't wait for the person to raise it; they likely won't. A short, private "I was out of line in that meeting" carries enormous weight.

3. Repair where the harm happened. If you embarrassed someone in front of the team, acknowledge it in front of the team. A private apology for a public moment only fixes half of it.

4. Change the pattern. An apology followed by the same behavior teaches people that apologies are a performance. The repair that counts is the next meeting going differently.

And before you speak, especially when you're frustrated, it helps to remember that critique of work and critique of a person are not the same thing. As I wrote, "In a healthy environment, mistakes can be named without becoming identities."

Questions for Leaders to Sit With

• Can I name the last time I said something sharp in a meeting? If not, is that because it didn't happen, or because I didn't notice?
• Who on my team has gone quieter, and when did it start?
• When someone was embarrassed in front of me by another person, did I say anything?
• Do people on my team ask me "dumb questions"? If not, why not?

Recovering From a Moment You Can't Forget

If you're the one still carrying it, here are steps that have helped me and the people I work with.

Write down what happened, plainly. Not the replay, not the interpretation, just the facts: what was said, who was there, what you did. Getting it out of your head and onto paper often takes some of its power away.

Separate the comment from the conclusion. "My manager said my idea was naïve in front of the team" is a fact. "I'm not good enough to be here" is a conclusion you may have drawn from it. Those deserve to be examined separately.

Check it against your evidence. What do your results, your peers, and your track record actually say about you? One moment from one person is not a full account.

Say it out loud to someone you trust. Humiliation thrives in silence. Saying it to a friend, mentor, or counselor often shrinks it back to its real size.

Decide what you need now. That might be a conversation with the person, a boundary, a conversation with someone else, or simply permission to stop replaying it. You get to choose.

Notice when it's a pattern. "One comment may be careless. Repeated comments may reveal something else entirely." If it keeps happening, that isn't about your sensitivity. That's about the environment.

You're Not Imagining It

Confidence rarely disappears in one dramatic moment. As I wrote in the book, "Sometimes it wears thin when the ground beneath our work keeps moving." A humiliating comment is one of those moments when the ground moves. It's no surprise that you're still steadying yourself.

If the person who said it forgot within minutes, that tells you something about them, not about you. You're allowed to remember. And you're allowed to stop letting that moment decide how much space you take up.

You're Not Imagining It is the sixth book in my Musings of a Recovering Executive series. It's about toxic workplaces, gaslighting, and reclaiming confidence: noticing what's happening, understanding the pattern, deciding what to do, and finding your way back to yourself, with reflection exercises at the end of every chapter. You can learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/books/youre-not-imagining-it/.

About the Author

Lynn Cirillo is an author, leadership mentor, and founder of Grounded Leadership LLC. I help people trust themselves again at work and in life, and stop measuring their worth by how much they can carry. I'm over 55, I still live with imposter syndrome, and I write about both because pretending otherwise helps no one. Learn more at https://MusingsOfaRecoveringExecutive.com/.