Written by Sandor Kovacs: CEO and Co-Founder of DorWay™
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They’re sharp, relentless, and irreplaceable when it comes to results—until you realize no one wants to be on their team.
Because not all high performers are good hires. Some bring more than just productivity—they bring tension, disengagement, and emotional labor that quietly wears teams down. Their presence may deliver numbers, but their behavior disrupts culture, trust, and morale.
This is the high-cost hire: a candidate who looks like a win on paper, but quietly disrupts your culture
In nearly three decades of executive coaching programs, team offsites, and leadership consulting, I’ve seen this dilemma play out in countless organizations:
Do we keep the high performer who creates low alignment?
It’s a difficult question. The tension between performance vs behavior is real—and costly.
But there’s a way forward. It starts with reframing what leadership really means, and asking better questions.
How do we build character leadership? How do we reduce toxic leadership before it spreads? And how do we commit to real leadership transformation?
By teaching managers how to improve emotional intelligence. First in themselves, then in others.
The Covey Matrix: Four Types of Talent
Let’s start with a leadership essential: The Covey Matrix. Originally designed to help prioritize what’s urgent vs. important, this tool also offers powerful insight when adapted to talent strategy.
So let’s make a shift. Let’s ask not just what’s urgent or important — but who is aligned, and who is not?
This matrix helps distinguish between performance vs behavior, showing us where people truly stand in terms of results and alignment — and what it means for your culture.
- 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. This is your character leadership pipeline.
- High Results, Low Alignment: The hardest to confront. The person delivering big wins, but draining the team to do it.
This last quadrant is the most dangerous. Not all high performers are good hires — especially when they lack a leadership mindset.
These are the hires that shape the future of your company. Not just through what they do, but through the way they do it.
How Toxic Traits Show Up in High Performers
I’ve coached many high performers, technically brilliant, exceptionally productive, and yet completely unaware of the wake they leave behind.
In many organizations, toxic leadership shows up in exactly this way. People who achieve big results, but lack emotional intelligence in leadership and fail to show true character leadership.
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 tone creates tension.
Their behavior demands constant emotional labor instead of fostering collaboration.
This is performance vs behavior in real time. Because while the metrics might look good on the surface, the impact on trust, morale, and culture runs deep.
And usually, that damage is ignored—until it’s too late. That’s when I get the call. That’s when we begin the work of leadership transformation.
Culture Isn’t Built by Productivity. It’s Shaped by Character.
When we say not all high performers are good hires, we mean it.. Because character doesn’t show up in performance metrics; character always shows up in how people relate.
Most of us know this: technical skills can be taught. But leadership transformation requires something deeper: alignment, the ability to relate, listen, collaborate, and communicate.
Why does that matter? Because people bring far more than resumes to work. Each team member, especially your high performers, brings:
- 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
Emotional labor multiplies when these issues go unaddressed. And left unchecked, even the most skilled performer can destabilize culture.
Yes, shifting someone’s way of being can happen in an instant. But it requires rigorous coaching.
How to improve emotional intelligence? With truth-telling conversations. This means holding people accountable to becoming bigger than the version of themselves they’ve settled for.
It starts with self-confrontation—an unflinching look in the mirror at how we show up for others. And it ends in a personal declaration: to lead with honesty, to go beyond mediocrity, beyond complaints, and beyond the quiet resignation of playing small.
But this isn’t just for individual contributors. It takes leadership at the top to drive this shift.
As I’ve said for years, the fish stinks from the head down. If senior leaders don’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 it. I’ve coached toxic leadership into trusted team champions. Not because they were “fixed,” but because they were challenged and supported.
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 created DorWay’s leadership coaching programs. To help organizations elevate high performance into high integrity, and grow 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 in the end, culture isn’t measured by productivity. It’s measured by the courage to lead unreasonably and the integrity to keep your word all the way 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 choose leadership transformation—and invest in evolving the whole person so 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 leadership coaching. Sometimes, it’s a serious performance plan. And sometimes, it’s letting someone go. Because as we said, not all high performers are good hires.
But ignoring the emotional intelligence gaps, and pretending that character doesn’t count is no longer an option.
You don’t just build teams by collecting talent. You build culture by leading people toward who they can become.
How To Coach High Performers to Become True Leaders
Yes, a high performer can become a toxic leader. But that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. Leadership transformation is possible. And it starts with shifting the lens from output to ownership.
If there’s real potential, they’ll come to see the crucial difference between performance vs behavior, and they’ll be open to learning how to improve emotional intelligence.
Here’s how you start coaching them. 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 character leadership standards must be honored? What behaviors are no longer acceptable? Don’t leave room for interpretation.
- Partner with Your People Team to Intervene with Power: Forget one-off trainings. You need immersion. Get them into a leadership coaching program that works on the internal game—mindset, communication, integrity, and emotional resilience. One that breaks old patterns and builds new leaders.
Coaching for Transformation, Not Just Output
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, and in growth. In what your people believe is acceptable.
So let this be your wake-up call:
The cost of keeping 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. Because true 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.
Want to know how to hire and develop for both high performance and high alignment from day one? More than 30 years of coaching leaders taught me the answer is to hire employees with capacity building.So before your next interviews, 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.That’s what leaders across the country learn in our Leaders Edge Path Training System™—how to break old patterns, overcome both internal and external resistance, and lead with character, alignment, and vision.