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The high performer who's destroying your team is your most expensive employee. You just can't see the bill yet.
I kept someone on my team longer than I should have, twice. I’ll describe this person as a “toxic producer.” Both times, I had plenty of signals that I should have fired them.
In both cases, these toxic producers were killing all of their quantitative goals, always overachieving, and regarded across the business as the top producing in the organization. At the end of each quarter, they would be in the top % of performers and they were always protected by the head of their groups in each organization.
I kept them because of their high performance and measurable value to the company. But while these employees were top performers, I realized something was amiss.
In both cases, I started to see unrest internally. I noted growing evidence that they were making work miserable for people around them. I received feedback of toxic behavior in small fragments, starting off as indirect, passive aggressive comments from other team members in meetings, which eventually crescendoed into direct accusations of these employees. Behavior like:
- Being rude and putting down others
- Causing unnecessary and counterproductive interpersonal strife (driving office gossip)
- Taking credit for something they didn’t work on
- Not following the core values of the business
To name just a few.
Eventually, the issues created by these employees reached HR, and the problem kept on escalating.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, I had done the math and decided that the pain of losing them was going to far outweigh the pain of keeping them. I was wrong about that. But I wasn’t wrong about the math.
When we finally fired the toxic producer, performance in their respective group dropped for months. I had to stand in front of people and explain results that had gotten worse, knowing I was part of the decision making process that contributed to it. That is not a comfortable place to stand.
I’m telling you this because most of what gets written about this decision is written from the comfortable side of it. In the ideal version of this story, the leader makes a call, the team exhales, performance doesn’t suffer, lesson learned. That’s the uncomplicated version. It’s definitely not the story most leaders are actually living when they’re in the middle of dealing with a toxic producer.
The real version of this story is knotty. You have someone producing results you haven’t been able to replicate anywhere else on the team. You also have a growing body of evidence that they are making life genuinely miserable for the people around them. Over time, the feedback is impossible to ignore; this person may be a liability.
But you wait. You tell yourself you’re gathering more information. You tell yourself they’re improving. You tell yourself this is just how high performance looks. Exceptional output sometimes comes wrapped in sharp edges, and the team needs to learn how to work with that. How do you justify firing a top performer to the board and investors?
The internal debate is excruciating.
What I’ve spent time thinking about since letting these people go is not just the decision itself, but how we, as an organization, got to the point where we allowed this behavior. The behavior had been present, in smaller ways, for a long time before it appeared in front of me. And here’s the part that should be uncomfortable to read if you’re in a leadership role: they almost certainly knew exactly what they were doing and who was watching.
People who operate in a toxic way are rarely unwitting. They are controlled upward and corrosive downward. In front of me, they were polished and effective. Behind me, they were a different person entirely. This is the blind spot all leaders share: when you occupy a position of power, bad behavior tends to happen outside your purview. Workplace bullies won’t misbehave in front of higher ups.
Sound familiar?
Workplace bullying doesn’t occur by accident; and while it can be hard to spot at first, we must confront it. Afterall, bad behavior is made possible by the environment around it. The organization I was part of building rewarded output. We celebrated performance. We promoted people who delivered on their goals. This isn’t wrong. But within that environment, we sent an implicit message, however unintentionally, that enabled bad actors: results provide cover. Toxic producers exploit that.
I share this story not to spread blame or to make my own delay defensible. I’m saying it because if you’re leading someone like this right now, the decision in front of you isn’t only about one person. It’s about what your organization has been communicating about what’s acceptable and whether you’re willing to change company culture that rewards toxic producers. Removing them is crucial, but it’s even more important to examine the culture that scaffolded this behavior. Bad behavior will continue without real, systemic change.
Here is what I learned from standing in the aftermath of the decision: the math I had been doing was wrong, but not in the way I expected. I had been measuring the wrong things.
On the cost side, I was measuring what I could see. Output. Revenue. Problems solved. The things that showed up in a spreadsheet and made the business look healthy. What I wasn’t measuring was everything happening behind those numbers: the turmoil and simmering cultural issues about to boil over.
In both cases, the decision to fire was right, but it was the harder call to make.
The right choice punishes you before it pays off.
Knowing that doesn’t make a hard decision easier. But it should make the delay to act harder to justify. Because if you already know what the right call is, then what you’re really doing every week is making a difficult situation harder to unravel.
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I would love to hear any thoughts on this topic in comments. Have.a great week.
Dave
