What to do when your problem leader or employee is also your top (or best) producer.

We hear this one all the time. The CEO has a developer, sales leader, or some kind of top producer who is causing some kind of disturbance internally, but they’re hesitant to address it because they don’t want to lose the revenue or projects or whatever benefit that employee is providing the company.

My first question is always if the company has established and communicated a set of core values to the organization. Values are the behaviors you’re doing when no one else is looking. If they do, my next question is, “are these values just words on a paper, or do you intend to hold people accountable to them?”

If this person is leading other people, it makes handling the situation much more urgent. By letting them continue to undermine the values in the organization, you’re letting everyone else know that you’re ok with this kind of leadership behavior. Then your employees don’t feel safe and then you start to see it in your team’s performance. If you were to do the math of losing this one person’s outputs versus losing the entire team’s financial performance, you will see quickly that it’s never in your favor to let one producer set the pace for the company.

And, if one person can cause that much of a swing in your company’s revenue or goal performance, you’ve built far too much reliance on one person, which is a major risk for the company.

If this person is an individual contributor, same thing. They are silently sending a message to the rest of your employees that there are no performance expectations as long as you make the company money. This is exactly how cultures start to die a little bit at a time, until they become toxic.

Most of these situations could be avoided if leaders got more comfortable at addressing the smaller issues with their teams in the moments they happen. What would be a slightly uncomfortable conversation in the beginning is now a very difficult and stressful conversation.

Bottom line, never sacrifice your team and company culture for one person who makes the company money. If you’ve let this kind of situation get out of control, let us know – we can help you set yourself back up for success.