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The Toxic Top Performer · The Science of Leading

• 0:00
  Welcome to the show everybody!
• 0:01
  I'm Claire Monroe, here with Edwin Carrington.
• 0:03
  Edwin, there's an old line in management that people don't leave companies,
• 0:07
  they leave managers.
• 0:08
  Everyone nods at it.
• 0:10
  But I want to ask a harder question today.
• 0:12
  If we all know bad leaders drive people out, why do so many of them keep getting
• 0:16
  promoted?
• 0:17
  Because, Claire, the toxic leader is very often the one with the best numbers.
• 0:22
  That's the uncomfortable truth.
• 0:24
  Nobody promotes someone for being difficult.
• 0:26
  They promote them for results.
• 0:29
  The damage shows up later, in other people's resignations, and those never get
• 0:33
  traced back to the person who caused them.
• 0:35
  There's research that backs that up in a pretty striking way.
• 0:39
  Michael Housman and Dylan Minor at Harvard Business School studied nearly sixty
• 0:43
  thousand front-line workers across eleven companies.
• 0:45
  They looked at toxic workers, people who were later let go for things like
• 0:49
  harassment, bullying or falsifying documents.
• 0:52
  And on average, those toxic workers were actually more productive than their peers.
• 0:56
  More productive.
• 0:57
  Which is exactly why they survive.
• 0:59
  And here's the cost side.
• 1:01
  They estimated that avoiding one toxic hire was worth about twelve thousand five
• 1:05
  hundred dollars, mostly through the turnover that person causes around them.
• 1:09
  Hiring a superstar, someone in the top one percent of performance,
• 1:13
  added only about five thousand three hundred.
• 1:16
  So keeping out one toxic worker was worth more than twice as much as finding a star.
• 1:21
  And that study was about front-line staff.
• 1:23
  Now put that same person in charge of a team.
• 1:26
  Their output still looks excellent, because they push hard and they deliver.
• 1:30
  But every month, someone good quietly updates their profile and leaves.
• 1:35
  So how should we even define a good leader, if the numbers can fool us?
• 1:38
  The Center for Creative Leadership offers a definition I find useful.
• 1:43
  Leadership is what produces three things in a group: direction,
• 1:47
  alignment and commitment.
• 1:49
  People know where they're going, their work fits together, and they choose to put in
• 1:54
  the effort.
• 1:56
  Notice that none of those are about the leader's own output.
• 2:00
  Leadership is measured in other people.
• 2:02
  So someone can hit their number and still fail at leadership.
• 2:05
  Easily.
• 2:06
  A leader who gets direction through fear and alignment through control may hit this
• 2:11
  quarter's target.
• 2:12
  But commitment collapses.
• 2:14
  And commitment is what keeps your best people in the building when a competitor
• 2:18
  calls.
• 2:19
  Let's talk about how big that effect is, because there's data on it.
• 2:22
  Donald Sull at MIT Sloan, together with Charles Sull and Ben Zweig of Revelio Labs,
• 2:27
  analyzed thirty-four million employee profiles during the Great Resignation.
• 2:31
  They found that a toxic corporate culture was more than ten times as powerful as
• 2:35
  compensation in predicting which companies lost people.
• 2:38
  Ten times, Edwin.
• 2:40
  And the culture elements that mattered most were things like feeling disrespected
• 2:44
  and seeing unethical behavior.
• 2:45
  Ten times more than pay.
• 2:48
  Most companies respond to a retention problem with a raise.
• 2:51
  They're pulling the weakest lever available.
• 2:54
  And culture isn't an abstraction here.
• 2:56
  For most employees, culture is simply how their own manager treats them on a Tuesday
• 3:01
  afternoon.
• 3:02
  Gallup has found that managers account for at least seventy percent of the variance
• 3:05
  in team engagement.
• 3:07
  So the manager isn't one factor among many.
• 3:09
  For most people, the manager is the job.
• 3:12
  Which is why the promotion decision is one of the most consequential people
• 3:15
  decisions a company makes.
• 3:17
  And it's usually made on the thinnest evidence: past output and a few conversations.
• 3:22
  So what should leaders look at before promoting someone, if not the numbers?
• 3:26
  Keep the numbers.
• 3:28
  Just stop treating them as the whole answer.
• 3:30
  The best closer isn't automatically the best manager.
• 3:34
  Leading people draws on different behavior than doing the work yourself.
• 3:38
  So before you promote, you measure how that person is wired to operate under the
• 3:42
  pressure of the new role, not the old one.
• 3:45
  OAD measures behavioral drive across five dimensions: Drive,
• 3:49
  Influence, Resilience, Structure and Leadership, and compares it against a benchmark
• 3:54
  built from your own top performers in that role.
• 3:57
  Does that tell you who's going to be toxic?
• 3:59
  No, and I want to be careful there, Claire.
• 4:01
  No instrument reads someone's character.
• 4:04
  What it does show is whether a person's natural way of operating fits what the role
• 4:08
  demands, before you've handed them a team.
• 4:11
  In one illustrative example, a two hundred person operations organization that used
• 4:16
  behavioral data for promotions cut its promotion mis-placement rate from roughly
• 4:21
  forty percent to roughly twelve percent.
• 4:24
  When people are placed in roles they're wired for, they're under less strain,
• 4:28
  and strain is where a lot of bad leadership behavior starts.
• 4:31
  And that measurement is fair to the candidate too, which matters when you're
• 4:35
  deciding someone's career.
• 4:36
  It does.
• 4:38
  OAD has been EEOC compliant since 2001, with no adverse impact on any protected
• 4:44
  class.
• 4:44
  And it's one structured input in the decision, never the only one.
• 4:48
  You still watch how they treat people.
• 4:50
  You still listen to the team.
• 4:52
  If you want to see what your best people actually have in common before your next
• 4:56
  promotion, start with the one you trust most.
• 4:59
  OAD's free Top Performer Profile takes seven minutes, results come back in
• 5:03
  twenty-four hours, and there's no credit card.
• 5:05
  That's O-A-D dot A-I.
• 5:07
  A leader's real results aren't in their own numbers, Claire.
• 5:11
  They're in who's still on the team a year later.
• 5:13
  Perfect place to leave it.
• 5:14
  Thanks for the wisdom, Edwin.
• 5:16
  Always a pleasure, Claire.