Show Notes
Every manager eventually has one. The best performer on the team, the one whose numbers you would never want to lose, and the one nobody else can stand working with. Every week you tell yourself the numbers are worth it. This episode is about finding out whether they actually are.
When you keep a toxic top performer, you think you are trading their attitude for their output. But you are only looking at half the math. The numbers show up on the report. The person who stopped speaking up, the two people who rebuilt their workflow to avoid a handoff, and the good employee quietly updating their resume do not.
The research backs this up. In a Harvard Business School study of almost 60,000 frontline workers across eleven companies, Michael Housman and Dylan Minor found that toxic workers were on average more productive than their peers, that avoiding one was worth nearly twice as much as hiring a top superstar, and that the people around them became more likely to behave the same way.
In this episode John Espinosa walks through The Exception, three moves for dealing with a toxic employee who is also your best performer.
ONE. RUN THE WHOLE NUMBER. Two columns: what they bring and what it costs. Fill the second with four questions. Who works around them, who stopped talking, who left, and what do you fix. Then ask whether the team would be upset or relieved if they resigned tomorrow.
TWO. MAKE THE HOW PART OF THE JOB. Most toxic top performers were told for years that the numbers were the job. Say it out loud: your numbers are the best on this team, and starting today how you get them counts just as much. Name two or three behaviors you can actually see, and put a date on it.
THREE. STOP MAKING THE EXCEPTION. The pass, the reroute, the cleanup and the excuse all tell your team the rules are for everybody else. Stop making them. And if nothing changes, be willing to lose the numbers.
This is managing difficult employees at the level that shapes your whole workplace culture: not just what one person does, but what the rest of your team learns from what you tolerate. ---------------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here
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