One thing ive come to really understand from the purely administrative/political side of business is you seemingly have to be a sociopathic dick to get ahead.
Those middle managers dont give two shits about the person theyre firing. Asked point blank to give an honest answer they continue to regurgitate weasel bullshit corporate word salad. Someone who isnt a soulless fuck isnt going to want to be in a position where they have to fire employees then lie like a retard as to why the employee is being fired when the employee is smart enough to realize whats going on.
Seen very similar things happening at my current company. Last year we got a new CEO and hes filled the place with yesmen, slowly creating an ever more toxic environment. So much so its caused a key C level employee to quit and many other lower tier employees to start looking for other jobs.
This isn't strictly true, it's just that at a certain point being a decent human being can be a liability to advancing your personal career in the very short term in a corporate environment. Middle managers have to keep their executive happy, and to do that they'll often need a few key allies at their own management layer. If they've been cursed with managing a department that actually has to deliver things, they're also going to want to have a few key workers and team leaders who owe them, but none of them should be indispensible. The smaller you can make your circle of people you need to please, the easier it is to maintain and advance your position.
Anything outside that is extra energy and extra goodwill you're going to have to burn at risk to yourself. Imagine your exec pushes some bullshit initiative. Maybe he decides he wanted to overhaul his division's entire service offerings through a DEI lens. It's nonsense and less than a thought and doomed to fail. It fails! He won't take the blame but he thinks the Communications director-- your colleague-- sabotaged it, and he thinks your in house dev team are mediocre and should also be thrown out and he makes it known that he thinks you should fire your whole dev team and outsource it.
What do you do? The decent thing to do is defend your colleague and stand up for your team and have a heart to heart with your exec about why the project really went wrong. In a long term stable organisation the self interested thing is to do that as well: a pattern of success and failures will soon prove that the deficiency lies with executive, and your team will reward your loyalty to them by being loyal to you. In an environment where you're planning to be gone in 24 months, and more crucially most of your team might be gone in 24 months even if you stick around, it's risking your own career for no tangible benefits. The self interested thing to do in this instance is slash the team, outsource it for pennies to the dollar on some pajeets, or a squad of Pinay in Manila. Get the asspats for lowering your department spend on wages, and get a promotion/movement before the outsourced team shits the bed and fucks up the actual work. Your next job, and your exit out of the bed you just shat in, depends on what your exec says about you. Your former team could go home and eat a shotgun and it won't matter as long as your old boss is telling people you're a hard working go getter who makes data driven decisions and pursues efficiencies relentlessly.
The way we run complex businesses in the 21st century incentivizes all the most toxic and short sighted elements of leadership. It permeates almost every level and if you've had the privilege of being shielded from it by a decent boss, they've certainly copped heat for it.
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