Written by Sandor Kovacs: CEO and Co-Founder of DorWay™
They’re sharp, relentless, and irreplaceable when it comes to results until you look around and realize no one wants to be on their team. Let’s talk about the hire that looks like a win on paper, but quietly disrupts your culture. In nearly three decades of executive leadership training, leading offsites, and coaching, I’ve watched more companies struggle with this same dilemma: Do we keep the high performer who creates low alignment?
The Covey Matrix: Four Types of Talent
Stephen Covey offered a framework that can help us think through this:
- Low Alignment, Low Results: Easy decision. Let them go.
- High Alignment, Low Results: Invest. Train. Reassign. Coach. These people often become top contributors with the right development.
- High Alignment, High Results: Keepers. These are your future leaders.
- High Results, Low Alignment: The hardest to confront. The person delivering big wins, but draining the team to do it.
And yet, these are the hires that shape the future of your company. Not just through what they do, but through the way they do it.
Results Are Only Half the Equation
I’ve coached many high performers, technically brilliant, exceptionally productive, and yet completely unaware of the wake they leave behind.
Some employees have even sent me voice recordings of their managers yelling, belittling, or weaponizing their authority. These individuals are often retained because they deliver results.
But at what cost?
- Their presence breeds conflict.
- Their words create tension.
- Their behavior demands emotional labor instead of fostering collaboration.
And while performance metrics may look strong on the surface, the damage to trust, morale, and culture runs deep until it becomes impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, that is often when I get the call to help.
Culture Isn’t Built by Productivity. It’s Shaped by Character.
Character always shows up in how people relate, not just in what they produce.
Most of us know this: technical skills can be taught. But alignment, the ability to relate, listen, collaborate, and communicate, requires deeper work.
Why?
Because people bring far more than resumes to work. They bring:
- Their past, and the unresolved stories that come with it
- Childhood experiences and ingrained emotional patterns
- Old bosses, buried resentments, and survival strategies
- Coping mechanisms disguised as communication styles
Shifting someone’s way of being can happen in an instant. But it requires rigorous coaching. It demands courageous, truth-telling conversations. It means holding people accountable to becoming bigger than the version of themselves they’ve settled for.
It begins with confronting oneself, an unflinching look at how you have been showing up for others. And it ends in a commitment, a declaration for what’s possible beyond mediocrity, beyond making complaints, beyond the quiet resignation of playing small.
It also takes leadership at the top driving this for it to work. As I’ve said for years, the fish stinks from the head down. If senior leadership doesn’t model strong character and uphold high standards, you can’t expect your team to rise any higher.
But change is possible. I’ve seen toxic employees become trusted team champions. Not because they were “fixed,” but because they were challenged.
I have witnessed employees who resisted presenting in front of a room, capture a room’s interest in one move. I have witnessed a person assigned to sales, hating every second of the process, only to become a top salesperson and eventually the president of a company.
Transformation doesn’t happen by accident.
It happens when people:
- See the real cost of their behavior
- Receive honest, rigorous feedback in a safe environment
- Are provided the right training and coaching
- Choose growth over performance alone
- Realize that leadership is a way of being, not just something we do
That’s why we built the programs at DorWay, to help organizations transform high performance into high integrity, and to develop leaders who refuse to settle for the status quo.
Our work equips people to cause breakthroughs, not just manage outcomes. To challenge comfort. To lean into the breakdowns required to unlock unprecedented futures. Because culture isn’t measured by productivity. It’s measured by the courage to lead unreasonably and the integrity to see it through.
The Leadership Choice: Enable or Evolve?
As a leader, you have a decision to make:
- Will you enable toxic performance because it “gets the job done”?
- Will you allow fear, concern, or mediocre behavior to stop you from holding someone accountable?
- Or will you invest in evolving the whole person so that the job gets done with people, not at their expense?
Remember, you hired them. You agreed to take them on. They are under your watch. Sometimes, the answer is coaching. Sometimes, it’s a serious performance plan. And sometimes, it’s letting someone go. But pretending that character doesn’t count is not an option.
Execution Challenge: This Week, Raise the Standard
• Pinpoint the Performance-Aligned Gap Identify one person who delivers results but erodes alignment, trust, or culture in the process. Be honest. Stop excusing behavior because it’s “hard to replace.”
• Confront the Truth Ask yourself: Have we invested in their growth beyond output? Or have we tolerated behavior that violates our standards because their numbers are good?
• Have the Hard Conversation Now Schedule a direct, no-BS conversation. Not about deliverables. About who they’re being. Don’t sugarcoat it. Call them up, not out.
• Demand Integrity, Not Just Output Be clear and specific: What behaviors must shift? What non-negotiables must be honored? What’s the standard and what happens if it’s not met? Don’t leave room for interpretation.
• Partner with Your People Team to Intervene with Power Not with surface-level training but with immersive coaching that reconditions mindset, integrity, emotional maturity, and communication. Get them into a program that breaks patterns, not just teaches tactics.
Final Word
Leadership isn’t just about what gets done. It’s about who you’re willing to become to make it happen and what you’re willing to no longer tolerate.
Because you get what you put up with.
And every time you allow low-alignment behavior to slide in the name of results, you lower the standard for everyone. You don’t just pay a price in morale. You pay it in retention. In trust. In growth. In what your people believe is acceptable.
So let this be your wake-up call:
The cost of tolerating misaligned high-performers is far greater than the courage it takes to confront them.
At DorWay, we don’t coach to preserve the status quo. We coach to disrupt it. Leadership is inconvenient. But remember, you volunteered to lead. We don’t train leaders to smooth over dysfunction. We train them to expose it so they can build what’s not been built in the past.
In our next article, we’ll unpack how to hire and develop for both high performance and high alignment from day one.
Until then, ask yourself:
Are we building a culture of integrity and transformation… or silently supporting dysfunction with excuses?
Only one of those will lead to an unprecedented future. And it starts with what you’re willing to no longer accept.