Sometimes individuals can cause a toxic atmosphere within a team by "rockstar-ing" certain aspects of the development work. For example, I once worked in a team where one person decided we weren't going to successfully meet a deadline without a significant rewrite of the code.

Instead of working with the team and sharing their vision, they decided that we didn't have time for explanations, and we were unlikely to understand anyway. So, the first thing they did was withdraw their support for the team. Next, they took all the software that we had written so far and rewrote it in another repository, one that we didn't have access to.

Without this person's support, we were unable to complete the work we'd already started; few of us felt like continuing with it afterward, anyway. Yes, our former teammate worked so hard that they met the deadline and yes that person got to demonstrate some software, but for the rest of us it removed all feelings of team ownership.

It was the most demoralizing demonstration I've ever been a part of. The more we listened to the particular individual sell our software, the more dis-empowered and disenfranchised the rest of the team felt. None of us wanted to be on a team with that individual again because technically it wouldn't have been working with, it would have been working under anyway.

The biggest problem with "rockstar-ing" is that it cultivates a culture of fear; this is how the rockstar holds on to their status, by undermining everyone else. The second biggest problem it causes is a single point of failure within the group where everyone else in the team is just in support of the main act. It ends up where we literally can't perform without the rockstar.

Not many level-headed, resourceful, and capable individuals would want to be in a supporting role to a narcissist. So rockstars create a self-perpetuating culture of fear, by either deliberately keeping the people around them downtrodden or by surrounding themselves with people who aren't quite good enough to challenge their rockstar status.

Either way, in a team like that, nobody grows; the team is stunted by the fixed mindset of the rockstar.

We'll talk about the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset in the next section and how growth is essential if we're going to operate well in an environment requiring the ability to learn rapidly.