There are some people who will take personal advantage of every situation. There are some people in whom the dark side wins. Your company should rigorously weed these people out. You can do it with compassion (remember, it was your mistake to hire them in the first place); but it should be done.

Fortunately, these people are rare. And we don’t base this claim solely on a personal faith in human nature.

Controlling assholes won’t listen. They’ll never admit they screwed up. Neither will political assholes. They’ll ignore obvious problems and deflect reasonable feedback, either because it’s not helpful politically or because their ego can’t take it. They don’t protect the product or the customer or the team. They protect themselves.

It’s the assholes who are focused on people—on controlling people—who make work miserable. Real assholes always make it personal. Their motivation is their ego, not the work. As long as they’re winning, they don’t give a shit about what’s happening to the product or what the customer has to deal with. These are the assholes who make it progressively more difficult to create something you’re proud of.

That’s when your team needs to have a counternarrative. The bullshit-asymmetry theory, Brandolini’s law, will be at play here: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude higher than to produce it.”

So you need to craft a great story and walk into meetings ready to support each other. Agree ahead of time—make sure everyone knows the script. Gather data to back you up so it’s not just your word against theirs. Then when the asshole pipes up, your crew will have the ammunition and manpower to call them out.

As you may have noticed, people with power are typically reluctant to give it up, and often have the means to defend their prerogatives. This is a serious impediment, since there’s no way to build a human-centric organization without flattening the pyramid.