I worked for other companies before joining ExxonMobil, and yes, Exxon has processes I had never seen anywhere else. I can clearly recognize the patterns you described, so let’s go case by case.
The first one, the boss pleasing behavior. At Exxon, employees are required to document their achievements and rely on their manager to defend them in calibration sessions against a large group competing for limited rankings. This creates a system where performance alone is not enough, and survival depends heavily on how well your manager advocates for you. The result is predictable. People learn very quickly that managing the manager matters as much as, or more than, delivering results.
What you are seeing is not personality, it is conditioning. The employee is trying to play a game that no longer exists. When you reject that dynamic and focus on results, it creates confusion and insecurity, so the behavior intensifies. The person is not trying to manipulate you, they are trying to survive a system that trained them to think this way. The way out is simple but uncomfortable. Stop rewarding the behavior, make expectations explicit, and consistently reinforce that results matter more than politics.
The second case is a classic safety culture side effect. There were periods at Exxon where safety metrics were tied to recognition and rewards, sometimes in a very visible way. Over time, that can shift behavior from genuine safety awareness to fear driven reactions. People become more afraid of the consequence of an incident than focused on handling it rationally.
So when someone refuses to move a table, it is not about the table. It is about years of being trained that any small action can escalate into a recordable event with consequences. You are not dealing with common sense, you are dealing with risk aversion at an extreme level. The fix is reassurance combined with clarity. Safety matters, but fear is not the operating model.
The third one is the hardest. Exxon is one of the largest companies in the world and historically provided a level of structure, benefits, and identity that many people internalize deeply. When they leave, they do not just lose a job, they lose a reference point. Repeating “when I was at Exxon” is often less about arrogance and more about attachment. Over time, reality replaces nostalgia.
Now the most interesting part is not even the employees. It is the reaction you received. You shared a real situation and asked for input, and people jumped to call you incompetent, told you to put employees on PIP, dismissed your concerns, and labeled people as losers and clowns. That response alone explains more about the culture than any internal document ever could.
If anything, your team is not the problem. They are the output of a system that optimizes for internal competition, dependency on hierarchy, and fear based controls.
The fact that you are trying to understand and not simply punish already puts you in a completely different category of leadership. In environments like Exxon, that kind of reflection is rare. Most managers would simply reinforce the system, not question it.
You are not dealing with difficult people. You are dealing with people recovering from a very specific kind of corporate conditioning.