The craziest story I’ve ever seen about toxic team culture in a workplace, and why and how it could happen to you.
I remember it well. I got up one morning, grabbed my coffee, and as is my habit, went to Google News to check out the morning’s headlines. One in the business section grabbed my attention: it was something about a team of high-level professionals at eBay being indicted on criminal charges of harassment and stalking a group of the company’s critics.
I had to read the headline a couple of times. What?
I read that story, and another one, and a third and a fourth. Details were scanty at that point but the upshot was: eBay had hired a several ex-military and ex-law enforcement personnel to create a crack “security” team. The original intent of the team was to deal with internal trade secret and information security violations, and physical security on eBay’s employee campus. Some of the team members took their responsibilities a little too seriously. Their work activities progressed from helping employees who were locked out of their offices to harassing people who had said some mildly critical things about the company using obscene text messages, phone calls intended to bait them into blackmail schemes, and even a bloody pig mask mailed anonymously to a house. You can’t make this stuff up.
The story was fascinating. I have seen (both in my personal practice, and in literature) plenty of stories about “teams gone wild” and engaging in toxic, damaging, almost nonsensical behavior, but this escalated to a whole new level of “What in the world?” I knew at some point, someone would write more about the situation, and today the New York Times delivered, in the form of a longform article largely developed with the cooperation of Veronica Zea, one of the team members who has been charged with several criminal offenses and is now pleading guilty.
Fully acknowledging there are multiple sides to every story, I have to say the NYT article’s presentation of the facts leaves me fascinated, but not surprised. What happened at eBay is just a dramatic, hit-the-gas, full-throttle version of what I’ve seen happen in other organizations. It’s the unfortunate dark side of having a strong, cohesive team with loyalty to each other and to their leader: if the leader’s motivations are toxic, and bad behavior doesn’t get checked, a team’s actions can spiral out of control fast. An equally fascinating, but far more destructive, version of that story happened at Enron in the early 2000s (but that’s a post for another day).
Think it can’t happen in your organization? Think again. Based on what I’ve read, and what I’ve seen in my own career, here are the conditions that have to be present for a situation like eBay’s to evolve. They aren’t uncommon.
The team members are inexperienced in general, or are new to their roles and aren’t entirely sure what typical business activities look like.
Veronica Zea, the former employee quoted in the NYT, is only 26 years old, and was only 23 when the malfeasance started. The article says she had never worked in an office before, and so she didn’t fully understand that your boss stabbing a chair with a knife and leaving the chair there as a “warning” about safety (true story) isn’t a normal action. When employees are inexperienced and unsure, or they are in a situation where they desperately need their jobs, they are generally malleable and can be manipulated by a toxic leader. Which leads me to the next condition:
The leader of the team is autocratic to the point of being dictatorial, and creates an environment where asking questions or talking about the team’s activities outside the team is seen as “disloyalty.” The leader also creates a fervent belief that the team is doing work no one else can do, which is critical to the mission of the organization (or the country, or the world) in some indispensable way.
James Baugh, the leader of Veronica’s team (Global Security and Resiliency), told his team members that they were “like a family” (you can read about my thoughts on that psyops scheme) and that they were “the only ones who can keep things from getting really bad.” He talked about a “circle of trust” outside of which team members were not supposed to talk about certain topics. People would get suddenly fired for seemingly extremely minor infractions (like chewing on a pen), and no one knew when they might be the one to get the boot. He also behaved in an erratic, and at times threatening, manner which created a culture of fear in the team. Charismatic, toxic leaders engage in the same kind of behavior to get (and maintain control) over followers in cults, street and motorcycle gangs, organized crime syndicates, and guerrilla and terrorist groups. It’s behavior we see over and over again in literature about destructive organizations. The only difference here is that it was happening at eBay, a publicly traded tech corporation. It couldn’t have happened without the final and most important condition:
The upper leadership of the organization is, on some level, aware that something is off, but chooses not to address it (because remember, doing nothing is in itself a choice).
The NYT article points out that Devin Wenig, eBay’s CEO, was revealed to have traded texts with Steve Wymer, eBay’s head of communications, about “crushing” one of the critics who was eventually targeted in the Global Security team’s intimidation campaign. I can’t stress this enough: organizational culture comes from the top. When two C-suite executives are engaging in that kind of dialogue, you can bet there is going to be an unusual and damaging level of tolerance for toxic behavior that you wouldn’t see in a healthier organization. I have yet to walk into a situation with a dysfunctional team where the leadership of the team – and usually also their leadership – was not aware, on some level, that things were not right. I’ve heard a million excuses as to why observed problematic behavior was ignored, or explained away. The bottom line is something I’ve told managers and leaders over and over – you get the behavior you expect from employees. And what you will allow will continue. We aren’t privy to most of the internal communications at eBay about the Global Security team, and I imagine most of what was said about the team, its leader, and their actions will never come to light. But there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, for behavior inside one team to escalate to the point that people are now under criminal indictment. In my experience, that does not happen without a tone being set at the top.
So, you want to keep this from happening in your organization? Remember two simple things I said above:
You get the behavior you expect from your employees. Set high expectations and communicate them clearly, well and often, and you have gone a long way to helping people behave appropriately in your organization.
What you will allow will continue. If you look the other way when you see things that trouble you, and tell yourself you’re too busy or stressed to deal with it (or that the person is too high of a performer to anger, or lose), you are sowing the seeds of your own destruction. Tolerating toxic behavior from employees is swallowing a poison pill that will kill you – or the entire organization – eventually. When you see something, do something about it. Right then. Not later.
I hope eBay’s learned a lesson from this whole juicy debacle. More than that, I hope other organizations learn from it. Things like this don’t have to happen, but they do. Not because people aren’t paying attention, but because they make a choice to ignore what they see. Don’t let that happen to you.