Every company has a top performer: the kind of person who crushes their numbers, outpaces their peers, and delivers results like clockwork. They’re your go-to, your clutch player, and the one you lean on when things get tough.
But what if I told you that person might be your biggest liability?
Seems unbelievable right? But it could be true.
Here’s the hard truth most leaders would want to avoid confronting: The success of your business is more important than the performance of any single individual — including your best performer. Including you.
Business is a team sport, and anyone who can’t collaborate, communicate, or operate in alignment with the team will be a liability, regardless of their personal output.
You may have team members who put up numbers like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or Wayne Gretzky — but if their excellence comes at the cost of your entire team’s performance, are they really worth keeping around?
When someone refuses to play well with others, creating friction, drama, or emotional waste, they’re not just hurting morale. They’re dragging down the entire organization.
You might be thinking: “But this person is my top revenue generator. If I let them go, what happens to our sales and growth?”
That’s an understandable fear, but keeping great performers who don’t work well with others is trading long-term culture for short-term comfort. It’s sacrificing your future for a false sense of safety today.
Instead, ask yourself what would happen if you did keep them around despite their shortcoming as a team player…
Your team would start to disengage.
People would stop trusting leadership that allowed a thorn to be planted in the company.
You’d find yourself spending more time managing chaos than building something great.
And before you know it, you would’ve gotten turnover, resentment, and a culture nobody wanted to be part of.
If you’ve got a team of 30 and one person is toxic, it’s not just a personality clash. That one person is a drag on your culture, your alignment, and your efficiency. Even if they’re posting elite numbers, a single worker who can bring down the energy and performance of 29 others is still a dead weight.
Leadership isn’t about protecting performance at all costs. It’s about protecting the mission.
As a leader, you have to create an environment where the whole team can win — not where one star player can operate above the standard.
If you want to scale and build something that lasts, then you need to make the hard calls. You need to remove the anchors that keep you from sailing out at full speed — even when the anchor might be one of the best, the brightest, and the highest performing you’ve seen.
When you stop tolerating behavior that erodes the culture, everything changes. You improve team dynamics, restore trust in yourself and your leadership, create re-alignment with your team, and accelerate the whole business forward.
So after you’re done reading this, ask yourself: Is your top performer actually helping you grow? Or are they holding you hostage?
If it’s the latter, it’s time to let go — not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary.
Best leaders think in terms of decades, and leaders who win are the ones willing to play it for the long haul.
