Across my client organizations, I keep hearing the same story. The characters change from company to company, but the plot doesn’t.
There’s an employee who delivers. They hit the numbers, land the wins and produce the results. And the way they do it is hurting the organization and the people in it.
In my last blog article – Developing Leaders Who Produce Sustainable Results – I wrote about the “what” and the “how.”
- The “what” is the goal: the number, the win.
- The “how” is the way we get there: how we treat people and the culture we build along the way.
The employees I’m talking about have mastered the “what.” Their “how” is broken. It’s toxic. It damages relationships, pits colleagues against one another and wears people down.
And it’s being excused.
“We’d Be Lost Without Them.”
Other leaders see this behavior. They know it’s happening. But they’re afraid to act.
When I ask why they won’t address it, why they won’t call it out, put the person on a performance plan or let them go, I hear the same responses almost everywhere:
- “We’d be lost without them.”
- “They’re the only one who knows how to do X.”
- “They own our relationship with our biggest customer.”
- “They work harder and longer than anyone else, including me.”
- “They recruited their whole team. If they leave, the team leaves with them.”
I’ve been hearing these for years. And I’ll say it plainly: they’re excuses.
Each one may contain a grain of truth. But together, they add up to a decision to let one person’s results outweigh everyone else’s experience at work.
The Real Cost of a Toxic “Star”
Employees notice when leaders look the other way. In SHRM’s Q2 2025 Civility Index, 70% of U.S. workers said managers prioritize business goals over treating employees with respect. Among workers who experienced incivility, 66% said their manager could have done more to prevent it.
That’s the “what” winning out over the “how,” and employees see it clearly.
The cost is real, too. SHRM found that each incident of incivility costs the affected worker an average of 36 minutes of lost productivity. Across the U.S. workforce, that adds up to roughly $2.07 billion a day.
An earlier Harvard Business School study put a price on individual toxic employees. It found that avoiding one toxic worker saved a company more than twice as much as hiring a superstar added. It also found toxic behavior is contagious: people who work alongside a toxic colleague become more likely to act the same way.
That matches what I see. When leaders tolerate the behavior, it becomes the model. People start copying what gets rewarded instead of living the organization’s values.
And over time, the leaders who wouldn’t make the call end up hurt, too. They lose credibility with their teams, and they lose good people who got tired of waiting for someone to act.
A Recent Reality Check – What Happened When A Toxic Star Left
Earlier this month, I caught up with a client I began coaching in late spring. At the start of our work together, there was one of these high-producing, toxic individuals on the leadership team.
Managing him was my client’s responsibility, and it wasn’t happening. His behavior was destructive enough to pit colleagues against each other. Worse, others were starting to imitate him.
Then he resigned. It was a very good day for everyone involved.
Three months later, I asked how the leadership team had adjusted. Remember, this was the person they were so worried about losing: the relationships he held, the people he’d brought in, the knowledge he had of the product and operation.
Everyone survived. A successor is in place and performing well. The team is healthier than it was before he left.
Ask The Hard Question
You can take action when someone’s behavior is out of bounds. And if the decision isn’t yours to make, you can push the leader you work for to face the hard question:
Is this person’s output so important that we’re willing to let their behavior take a toll on our colleagues, our values and the morale of our organization?
When you put it that way, it’s hard to say yes. Few leaders would say out loud that one person’s productivity matters more than the rest of the team, their peers or the values the company stands for.
But too often, we’re afraid to ask the question at all.
You can ask it. You can act. And as I saw this week, the organization can come out stronger on the other side.
