Get Rid of the Assholes: Stop Rewarding Toxic High Performers

A high performer who destroys trust can be a negative-value employee. Sustainable leadership requires CEOs to measure not only what people deliver (results), but also what their behaviour makes possible—or impossible (conditions) —for everyone around them to perform well.

FRUITFUL CEO PRINCIPLE: Never confuse impressive individual output with positive organisational contribution. The true leadership question is not only “What did you achieve?” but “What became stronger because you were here?”

An uncomfortable truth sits inside many organisations: the person doing the most damage can also be highly rewarded. They hit the numbers, win clients and look decisive, so the company pays a bigger bonus, expands their authority and gives them more people to manage.

From below, the picture is different. Colleagues are humiliated, managers stop challenging bad ideas, strong employees leave, and future leaders learn that stated values matter less than the numbers.

Simon Sinek (one of my favourite leadership guru) uses a deliberately provocative word for this kind of low-trust high performer: the "asshole" . The language is blunt and provacative, but the problem is serious.

When a company repeatedly promotes people who deliver results while destroying trust, it institutionalises toxicity.

Sinek popularises a useful performance-and-trust framework drawn from conversations about elite Navy SEAL teams. Performance asks whether someone can execute the mission. Trust asks whether colleagues can rely on that person's character, judgement and behaviour when the pressure is high and nobody important is watching. Sinek's own leadership principles emphasise that trust, teamwork and leadership are central to exceptional team performance.

Every organisation wants people high in both performance and trust. The difficult choice is between a solid, high-trust performer and a brilliant individual performer whom nobody trusts. Many businesses choose the second because revenue, margin, output and deadlines appear on dashboards. Trust rarely does.

That creates a dangerous distortion. We know what the executive delivered, but not the resignations, withheld ideas, damaged confidence, customer risk or weakened succession capability left behind.

Toxic leaders often rise because organisations reward traits that look powerful. Confidence is mistaken for competence, visibility for contribution and aggression for decisiveness. Research on narcissism and leadership has found that narcissistic traits can help people emerge as leaders without reliably making them more effective.

Toxic high performers can also excel at managing upwards. The CEO sees confidence; direct reports experience intimidation, blame shifting or information control. Short reporting cycles then encourage tolerance because the person is considered commercially necessary "for now".

Then comes the hostage problem: "She owns the client" or "We cannot lose him this year." When one person becomes too important to challenge, the organisation already has a succession and concentration-risk problem. Indispensability must never become a licence to damage culture.

The biggest mistake is treating toxic leadership as a soft HR issue instead of an economic one. The numbers will vary, but the principle stands: a high-output employee can still be a negative-value employee.

Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as its most important team dynamic. When people can ask questions, admit mistakes and challenge assumptions without humiliation, teams are better positioned to learn and perform.

People can tolerate demanding work. What they struggle to tolerate indefinitely is disrespect, unethical conduct, cutthroat behaviour and environments in which they cannot trust how power will be used.

The Fruitful CEOs should therefore stop calculating only gross performance and start calculating net contribution. Ask what remains after the hidden costs are considered: revenue generated minus people lost, projects completed minus capability weakened, customers won minus risk created, and problems solved minus problems caused.

None of this means building a soft organisation. Fruitful companies need demanding leaders, ambitious targets, accountability and consequences. The distinction is whether discomfort serves the mission or the leader's ego.

Healthy leaders challenge the work while preserving dignity. They accept responsibility, share credit and develop successors. Toxic leaders attack the person, take credit, distribute blame and create dependency. High standards and high trust should reinforce each other.

CEOs cannot solve this problem with another poster about corporate values. We need management systems that make trust, behaviour and multiplication visible.

Where behaviour involves bullying, harassment, discrimination, dishonesty or serious misconduct, proper HR and legal processes matter.

Finally, make cultural exceptions visible at board level. Directors should ask which senior leaders are being retained despite repeated behaviour concerns, what commercial argument is being used to justify the exception, what succession plan would remove the dependency, and what evidence shows genuine improvement. Culture becomes fragile when the most powerful people are exempted from standards that everyone else is expected to follow.

Culture is not what is printed on the wall. Culture is what happens when a successful person violates the values and leadership decides what to do next.

Every time you bonus a leader who delivers through fear, you teach people that fear works. Every time you promote someone who damages colleagues but beats the target, you teach employees that the target outranks the values. Every time you protect a commercially valuable bully, you make dignity negotiable.

Trust is not a soft alternative to performance. It is infrastructure for sustainable performance today. It affects whether bad news reaches you early, whether employees challenge flawed decisions, whether talented people stay and whether future leaders learn collaboration rather than intimidation.

So look around your leadership table. Who produces extraordinary numbers but leaves weaker people and damaged relationships behind? Who appears indispensable because everyone else has been made dependent? Who would your employees identify immediately as the "Assshole" if they could answer without consequences?

Then ask the opposite question: who makes everyone around them better?

The ultimate test of fruitful leadership is not simply, What did you achieve? It is, What became stronger because you were here?

If toxic people repeatedly rise, the problem is not only the individuals. The system is doing what leadership has taught it to do. Change the measures. Change the incentives. Change who gets promoted. Coach people who can change. Apply fair consequences when they will not.

And when a high performer has been properly confronted, fairly supported and clearly held accountable but still chooses toxicity over trust, stop confusing output with leadership. Protect the culture that everyone else has been quietly trying to survive.

Share your perspective in the comments, and if you believe business needs leaders who can deliver exceptional results without destroying the people and culture that make those results possible , subscribe to The Fruitful CEO .

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