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.

A culture of candor does not mean that you can speak your mind without concern for how it will impact others. On the contrary, it requires that everyone think carefully about the 4A guidelines. This requires reflection and sometimes preparation before you give feedback, as well as monitoring and coaching from those in charge.

Once you have a workforce made up nearly exclusively of high performers, you can count on people to behave responsibly. Once you have developed a culture of candor, employees will watch out for one another and ensure their teammates’ actions are in line with the good of the company. Then you can begin to remove controls and give your staff more freedom. Great places to start are the lifting of your vacation, travel, and expense policies. These elements give people more control over their own lives and convey a loud message that you trust your employees to do what’s right. The trust you offer will in turn instill feelings of responsibility in your workforce, leading everyone in the company to have a greater sense of ownership.

In most cases, the culprit is good people behaving badly, not bad people behaving badly. If it's the latter, no cultural shift is going to help, by the way. Toxic or ineffective people simply need to be extracted, in part because of the cultural damage they will do. Keeping them around is an implicit endorsement of their behavior. But if you've got a team of good people and you know what kind of culture they need to deliver your version of excellence, now the fun starts: how exactly are you going to build it?

In most cases, the culprit is good people behaving badly, not bad people behaving badly. If it's the latter, no cultural shift is going to help, by the way. Toxic or ineffective people simply need to be extracted, in part because of the cultural damage they will do. Keeping them around is an implicit endorsement of their behavior. But if you've got a team of good people and you know what kind of culture they need to deliver your version of excellence, now the fun starts: how exactly are you going to build it?