[Leadership] 성공이 만든 리더의 위기와 성장의 심리학 - Part 6. The Villain Effect — A Story of How Organizations Lose Themselves
The Villain Effect: That One Guy Who Somehow Kept Getting Promoted
You've seen him. Maybe you've worked with him. He didn't break any rules — not the written ones, anyway. And somehow, that made it so much worse.
Let me tell you about someone I once worked with. I'll call him James. James was the kind of person who always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. He wasn't the hardest worker on the team — everyone knew that. But he was very good at one specific thing: making sure the right people noticed him when the results came in.
When the team hit a target, James was the one presenting the numbers to leadership. When something went wrong, James was conveniently in a separate meeting. He never lied — not exactly. He just had a gift for framing things. For being the face of good news and absent during the bad.
Within two years, he had two promotions. The team that did the actual work? Most of them had quietly moved on. The ones who stayed had learned something they probably wished they hadn't.
- James didn't create himself. The organization built him — by rewarding what was visible and ignoring what actually mattered.
- The moment he got promoted, everyone around him took notes. Not consciously — but they did. And slowly, the culture started to shift.
- This doesn't happen the same way in every organization. Consulting firms, shipbuilding companies, and tight-knit SMEs each have a very different story — and a very different ending.
- The fix isn't complicated. But it has to happen early — at the design stage, before the damage is done.
- The organizations that last aren't necessarily the biggest or the most sophisticated. They're the ones that built the right soil from the beginning.
Chapter 1 — How Does Someone Like James Even Happen?
Here's the thing about James — he didn't show up as a villain. Nobody does. He showed up as a highly motivated, confident team member who got results. And in the beginning, that was genuinely true. He worked hard. He delivered. There was nothing to complain about.
But over time, as he figured out how the system worked, his behavior started to shift. Not dramatically — just gradually. He started investing less in the work itself and more in how the work was perceived. He stayed later not to finish tasks but to be seen at his desk when the manager walked by. In meetings, he made sure to speak last, after he'd heard everyone else's ideas, so he could present a polished version as if it were his own.
And the organization never pushed back. Because his numbers were fine. Actually, his numbers were great — on paper.
"His numbers were real. That was the hardest part. You couldn't point to a lie — not directly. The problem was everything that wasn't in the numbers."
— a colleague, three years after James left for his next role
This is how it works. People like James aren't con artists. They're just very good at reading what the system rewards — and then optimizing for exactly that. They find the gap between what's measured and what actually matters, and they live in it.
"So this is how you get ahead here."
Nobody said it out loud. But everyone was watching. And everyone understood.
Chapter 2 — The Day He Got Promoted, Everything Changed
When James got his first promotion, the team didn't say much. What was there to say? Management had made their decision. But something shifted in the room that day — something quiet, almost invisible.
The newer people on the team, the ones still figuring out how things worked — they were watching. They saw who got rewarded and for what. They drew their own conclusions. And over the next few months, without anyone planning it, the team started to behave differently. People shared less. Collaborations became more guarded. In meetings, everyone started managing their visibility a little more carefully.
"Okay, so that's how this place works."
That single thought — silent, personal, never spoken aloud — is more powerful than any culture memo the company could ever write. Once people think it, the rules of the game have changed.
The good people — the ones who genuinely wanted to do solid work and didn't want to play these games — started leaving. Not all at once. One by one, over about a year. Each of them had a perfectly reasonable explanation: a better opportunity, more money, a new challenge. But if you talked to them honestly, the real answer was simpler. They were tired of working hard for someone else to take the credit.
The quarterly numbers still looked fine for a while. They usually do. The real damage — the trust that's gone, the talent that left, the habits that took root — that stuff doesn't show up in a spreadsheet until it's too late to fix easily.
Chapter 3 — It Depends on Where You Work
Here's what I've noticed after working across different kinds of organizations — the James story doesn't play out the same way everywhere. The type of organization matters a lot. Not because people are fundamentally different, but because the conditions either make it easy for someone like James to thrive, or they make it very difficult.
Think about three very different places: a consulting firm, a shipbuilding company, and a small but solid manufacturing business with about 80 people. Same James, three very different outcomes.
In a consulting firm, James is in his element. Everyone is on an 18-month clock — perform visibly or move on. There's no time to build real trust, no long-term track record to examine. By the time anyone figures out what James has actually been doing, he's already been promoted to the next level, or he's moved to a client company with a glowing reference. The UP-or-OUT culture is brilliant at creating intensity — but it's also the perfect cover for someone who's good at looking intense without actually being deep. James loves this environment. He was basically designed for it.
In a shipbuilding company, James has a harder time at first. People stay for twenty years. The work is physical and visible — a hull either passes inspection or it doesn't. You can't fake your way through a sea trial. The senior engineers remember who actually solved the problem in 2009, and they'll tell you if you ask. James can still rise here, but it takes longer and requires more genuine credibility.
The catch? Once James does get entrenched in a place like this, he's nearly impossible to move. He's been here fifteen years. He has relationships in every department. He knows where every body is buried. Nobody wants to be the one to start that fight. So he stays — sometimes for decades — and the organization learns to work around him like a permanent obstacle.
Now put James in an 80-person company where the founder still walks the production floor every morning. Suddenly, his toolkit doesn't work. The owner was in the room when the team solved the problem — he saw exactly who did what. There's no gap between "what the numbers say" and "what actually happened" because everyone can see what actually happened. James tries to claim credit in a team meeting and three people immediately push back — not politically, just factually. "Actually, that was Minjung's idea. You were on leave that week." James can't manufacture fog in a place where everyone can see clearly. He either adapts and becomes genuinely useful, or he leaves. Either way, the organization wins.
We spend a lot of time admiring the big consulting firm and the global shipbuilder. But in the specific fight against the James effect, it's often the unfashionable, unglamorous 80-person company — the one nobody writes case studies about — that wins.
Chapter 4 — The Manager Who Got It Right
A few years after the James situation, I worked with a manager I'll call David. He ran a team about the same size, in a similar industry. But his team was different. After two years, the same people were still there. They were more capable than when they started. They spoke well of each other, even under pressure.
I asked him once what he did differently. He thought about it for a second and said, "I just decided from the beginning what I was actually trying to build." That was it. Not a framework, not a policy — just a clear, early decision about what success would mean on his team.
Every review, after going through the results, David would ask: "How did you get there? Who helped you? What would have happened to the team if you'd been on leave?" It wasn't an interrogation — it was just genuine curiosity. But that curiosity sent a message: on this team, the process matters, not just the outcome. James-type behavior becomes much less useful in that environment.
"One strong quarter tells me someone can perform under the right conditions," he said. "It doesn't tell me what kind of leader they'll be." He asked peers. He looked at what happened to the people who worked under a candidate — did they grow, or did they quietly ask for transfers? A strong individual number can be the result of genuinely good work, or it can be the result of quietly extracting from the team. David wanted to know which one it was before making a permanent decision.
"A good manager's team should be able to run without them," David said. "That's the goal — not dependency, capability." He evaluated managers on whether the people under them were getting better, taking on more, feeling confident enough to disagree. That one shift changes everything about who wants to be a manager on your team and why.
Decisions went through multiple people. Recognition was shared publicly. There was no single gatekeeper for visibility. "I'm not trying to create bureaucracy," he told me once. "I'm just making sure the loudest person in the room can't quietly rewrite the rules in his own favor." Simple idea. Harder to implement than it sounds. But it works.
On a ship, the James problem doesn't survive very long.
When you're at sea, the work is too real and the consequences too immediate for someone to fake their way through it for long. A first officer who takes credit for safe navigation while hiding the near-misses will eventually cause an accident. The sea doesn't care about quarterly reviews. It gives you immediate, unambiguous feedback.
I've thought about that a lot over the years — in boardrooms, in strategy meetings, watching consulting firms burn through talented people every eighteen months, watching shipbuilding companies carry the same problematic senior manager for fifteen years because the politics of removing him were too complicated. And then watching a quiet, unglamorous company in a mid-sized port city outlast both of them, simply because the founder always knew exactly what was happening and rewarded the right things from day one.
The technology changes. The market changes. The regulations change. But the organizations that still exist twenty years from now will be the ones that figured out — early, deliberately — what kind of behavior they were actually rewarding. And made sure it was the right kind.
"Design the soil carefully. Because whoever grows in it will define what kind of place this is — and whether the people worth keeping actually want to stay."
— Captain Ethan
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