To be clear, maintaining good relationships is very important. Good relationships are the lubricant that keeps the machine running smoothly; if someone has poor social skills or doesn't make an effort to maintain good relationships, they'll cause unnecessary friction, and they'll end up wasting time and effort on a conflict when they could have solved by problem by maintaining a better relationship.
But, not every conflict is an unnecessary conflict that could have been solved by maintaining a better relationship! Sometimes people refuse to fix problems, and the only options are to apply pressure to them or let the problem go unfixed. Sometimes "lack of lubricant" isn't the reason the machine is broken.
(One way to see this is to note that Agrawal did not maintain a good relationship with Mudge. If maintaining good relationships is part of the job, did Agrawal fail at his job? Or do you think only the lower-ranked person is responsible for maintaining good relationships?)
When you make someone head of security, there are a handful of ways they can go about it:
* They can be utterly ineffectual, ideally while looking good in the press and maintaining good relations across the company. The latter is easy when you never have to ask anyone to do anything.
* They can be effective, which requires the ability to draw on and coordinate resources far beyond security. Their ability to do this is reliant entirely on the support and backing they get from the top. This will make people angry, because it's inevitably going to lead to reshuffling priorities and making choices people dislike. It's possible to maintain good relationships while doing this, if you have strong backing and you at need to convincingly be empathetic about people's feeling while they do what you security and privacy demand.
* They can be ineffectual while trying work across the org and negotiate without backing. Eventually this just pisses people off because you're constantly asking for things and they just want you to go away.
As a security leader, your ability to maintain good relationships while being effective is contingent on how much backing you get. If you're not backed sufficiently, you cannot do both, and then you have to make awkward choices.
There’s many facets to these types of jobs, and these types of teams.
I suspect that he was a “known quantity,” when he was hired, and acted as he was expected to act, by the person that hired him.
Jack Dorsey had his own issues, and pleasing him may not have counted for much, after the new folks took over.
I do have issues with declaring that someone at that level is being fired “with cause,” especially someone that knows where the bodies are buried. This goes double, for someone well-known for doing well in other environments. Usually, there’s some kind of “golden handcuffs,” and the firee simply “leaves to spend more time with their family.”
Regardless of his faults, they set themselves up for this. From here, it appears to be a rather petty personality spat that may end up hurting a whole bunch of folks.
So yes, you are correct, but the person at fault may not be Mudge.
As head of X, maintaining good relationships is part of your job. It's actually the biggest part of your job.