The Toxic Top Performer

Claire Monroe

Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington. Edwin, there's an old line in management that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Everyone nods at it. But I want to ask a harder question today. If we all know bad leaders drive people out, why do so many of them keep getting promoted?

Edwin Carrington

Because, Claire, the toxic leader is very often the one with the best numbers. That's the uncomfortable truth. Nobody promotes someone for being difficult. They promote them for results. The damage shows up later, in other people's resignations, and those never get traced back to the person who caused them.

Claire Monroe

There's research that backs that up in a pretty striking way. Michael Housman and Dylan Minor at Harvard Business School studied nearly sixty thousand front-line workers across eleven companies. They looked at toxic workers, people who were later let go for things like harassment, bullying or falsifying documents. And on average, those toxic workers were actually more productive than their peers.

Edwin Carrington

More productive. Which is exactly why they survive.

Claire Monroe

And here's the cost side. They estimated that avoiding one toxic hire was worth about twelve thousand five hundred dollars, mostly through the turnover that person causes around them. Hiring a superstar, someone in the top one percent of performance, added only about five thousand three hundred. So keeping out one toxic worker was worth more than twice as much as finding a star.

Edwin Carrington

And that study was about front-line staff. Now put that same person in charge of a team. Their output still looks excellent, because they push hard and they deliver. But every month, someone good quietly updates their profile and leaves.

Claire Monroe

So how should we even define a good leader, if the numbers can fool us?

Edwin Carrington

The Center for Creative Leadership offers a definition I find useful. Leadership is what produces three things in a group: direction, alignment and commitment. People know where they're going, their work fits together, and they choose to put in the effort. Notice that none of those are about the leader's own output. Leadership is measured in other people.

Claire Monroe

So someone can hit their number and still fail at leadership.

Edwin Carrington

Easily. A leader who gets direction through fear and alignment through control may hit this quarter's target. But commitment collapses. And commitment is what keeps your best people in the building when a competitor calls.

Claire Monroe

Let's talk about how big that effect is, because there's data on it. Donald Sull at MIT Sloan, together with Charles Sull and Ben Zweig of Revelio Labs, analyzed thirty-four million employee profiles during the Great Resignation. They found that a toxic corporate culture was more than ten times as powerful as compensation in predicting which companies lost people. Ten times, Edwin. And the culture elements that mattered most were things like feeling disrespected and seeing unethical behavior.

Edwin Carrington

Ten times more than pay. Most companies respond to a retention problem with a raise. They're pulling the weakest lever available. And culture isn't an abstraction here. For most employees, culture is simply how their own manager treats them on a Tuesday afternoon.

Claire Monroe

Gallup has found that managers account for at least seventy percent of the variance in team engagement. So the manager isn't one factor among many. For most people, the manager is the job.

Edwin Carrington

Which is why the promotion decision is one of the most consequential people decisions a company makes. And it's usually made on the thinnest evidence: past output and a few conversations.

Claire Monroe

So what should leaders look at before promoting someone, if not the numbers?

Edwin Carrington

Keep the numbers. Just stop treating them as the whole answer. The best closer isn't automatically the best manager. Leading people draws on different behavior than doing the work yourself. So before you promote, you measure how that person is wired to operate under the pressure of the new role, not the old one. OAD measures behavioral drive across five dimensions: Drive, Influence, Resilience, Structure and Leadership, and compares it against a benchmark built from your own top performers in that role.

Claire Monroe

Does that tell you who's going to be toxic?

Edwin Carrington

No, and I want to be careful there, Claire. No instrument reads someone's character. What it does show is whether a person's natural way of operating fits what the role demands, before you've handed them a team. In one illustrative example, a two hundred person operations organization that used behavioral data for promotions cut its promotion mis-placement rate from roughly forty percent to roughly twelve percent. When people are placed in roles they're wired for, they're under less strain, and strain is where a lot of bad leadership behavior starts.

Claire Monroe

And that measurement is fair to the candidate too, which matters when you're deciding someone's career.

Edwin Carrington

It does. OAD has been EEOC compliant since 2001, with no adverse impact on any protected class. And it's one structured input in the decision, never the only one. You still watch how they treat people. You still listen to the team.

Claire Monroe

If you want to see what your best people actually have in common before your next promotion, start with the one you trust most. OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card. That's O-A-D dot A-I.

Edwin Carrington

A leader's real results aren't in their own numbers, Claire. They're in who's still on the team a year later.

Claire Monroe

Perfect place to leave it. Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.

Edwin Carrington

Always a pleasure, Claire.