Dear Leaders,
For a thousand years, the Byzantine Empire was the most sophisticated civilization on earth: unmatched wealth and institutions, brilliant diplomats, and a military that outlived Rome itself. The empire rotted from within because its elites became obsessed with internal politics, plotting, and backstabbing each other for marginal gains in status.
That is why the word “byzantine” today is universally synonymous with toxic, self-defeating bureaucracy.
In the past week, I’ve advised three different CEOs dealing with a similar migraine.
One has two department heads locked in a localized Cold War, dragging their entire teams and HR into it with them. Another is watching a rogue executive play armchair CEO in a slow-motion coup. The third is managing two superstar rainmakers who are actively sabotaging each other’s mega-deals.
The default instinct for all three CEOs has been to step back and let the highly paid adults work it out.
It is an understandable reflex when running complex, global organizations with a packed calendar. But ignored conflict is a virus, metastasizing into every healthy department and eventually consuming the host.
I gave all three the same advice: deal with it head-on.
They already knew it had to be done. Just needed someone to remind them why it can’t wait.
Letting infighting develop is one of the most consequential mistakes leadership can make. When two senior executives are fighting each other, the animosity flows straight down the org chart. Middle managers are forced to choose sides. The product team stops answering emails from the sales team. Routine approvals get weaponized. The conflict starts transforming a business built to serve customers and fight competitors into a sprawling political apparatus built to fight itself.
From factions to silos. Good luck reversing that once it’s set.
By stepping back and letting them figure it out – after the conflict has already expanded beyond the two – we’re abdicating the primary responsibility of our job. It also conveniently lets us off the hook today. The bill comes due tomorrow.
The single most important function of a CEO might be to channel the organization’s energy against an external target – the market, competitors, GTM speed. We must give the company a compelling reason to unify and a clear mandate to execute.
A team sprinting toward a shared, urgent goal doesn’t have the bandwidth, the time, or the need to bicker over grievances that eventually metastasize into corporate civil war.
Egos in the C-suite are not the problem. Egos are just raw energy. The problem is a lack of direction for that energy.
The Manhattan Project put that theory to its hardest test.
A remote desert facility packed with the most colossal, fragile, and volatile egos on the planet: dozens of brilliant physicists, all used to being the undisputed smartest person in any room. By all logic, it should have been a political nightmare.
It wasn’t.
Because they had an urgent, terrifying external enemy: Nazi Germany and the existential threat of losing the race to the bomb.
An existential threat clarifies the mind. If your executives have enough free time to fight each other, it means the market hasn’t been framed as a terrifying enough monster. And you’re the one who has to give them that monster to fight.
History is merciless to leaders who leave that vacuum unfilled.
Alexander the Great built the largest empire in the ancient world. But as he lay dying, he refused to name a successor. When his generals asked who should inherit the empire, his famous last words were: “To the strongest.”
It was the ultimate “work it out among yourselves” mandate. Without a unifying leader driving a shared direction, his generals spent the next forty years assassinating each other, ripping the greatest empire on earth to shreds just to prove who was the strongest.
That is what happens when leadership leaves a vacuum. The focus turns inward. The weapons point at each other.
Step in. Point the spears outward.
Onward,
Hamza
