When Performance and Culture Collide
Over the past several years, one leadership dilemma has surfaced repeatedly in my work with senior executives. It usually begins quietly—in a coaching conversation that starts with some version of:
“I need your help thinking through a situation.”
The situation is familiar. A senior or highly valued employee delivers real results—but behaves in ways that strain, undermine, or contradict the organization’s culture. Leaders rarely frame it this way. More often it sounds like: “I can’t believe they did that… but that behavior is completely unacceptable here.”
This tension between performance and culture is neither rare nor new. It shows up across industries and organizational sizes. What continues to strike me is not that leaders wrestle with it—but how often they delay action once the pattern becomes clear.
That delay matters.
Culture Isn’t What You Aspire To. It’s What You Tolerate.
Most organizations can articulate their aspirational culture—the values they want to stand for, the behaviors they hope to see, the tone they want leaders to set. These aspirations are often thoughtful and sincere.
But there is also the actual culture—the behaviors that are routinely displayed, reinforced, or allowed to persist in practice.
The gap between these two cultures is where leadership credibility is either built or eroded.
In my experience, culture is best understood behaviorally. It shows up less in what leaders say and more in what they tolerate—especially when that behavior comes from people who are perceived as valuable, hard to replace in the short term, or influential in setting the tone for others.
Not All Cultural Misalignment Is the Same
One reason this dilemma persists is that cultural misalignment is often treated as binary: either someone “fits” or they don’t. That framing is too blunt to be useful.
A more practical way to think about cultural behavior is through four buckets.
Bucket 1: Modelling Aspirational Culture
Behaviors that exemplify the organization at its best. Leaders want more of these and often hold these individuals up as role models.
Bucket 2: Reflecting Acceptable Actual Culture
Behaviors that may not be exemplary, but are aligned enough with organizational norms to be acceptable. With feedback and coaching, people here can move toward the aspirational culture.
Bucket 3: Fundamentally Unacceptable—but Potentially Correctable
Behaviors that undermine trust, collaboration, or decision quality but do not clearly violate law, HR policy, or explicit ethical standards. Often, these reflect the absence of desired behaviors rather than overt misconduct.
For those in Bucket 3, my stance is this: they need a clear message that the behavior is unacceptable and must change—paired with a time-bound opportunity to do so.
Whether that window is one, three, or six months will vary by organization and role. What matters is that there is explicit commitment from the individual, a concrete development plan focused on the specific behavior, clear observable metrics, and advance notice that failure to meet those commitments will lead to severe consequences.
Coaching without clarity—or without consequences—is not development.
Bucket 4: Disqualifying Behavior
Behaviors that cross clear lines: violations of law, HR policy, or widely understood ethical standards within the organization.
In this scenario, it is my stance that these individuals should be separated from the organization. Performance does not compensate for integrity breaches. This is not a research mandate; it is a leadership position.
A Few Illustrative Examples
What belongs in each bucket is highly organization-specific. The examples below are not exhaustive, nor are they universally disqualifying. They are simply a sampling of situations I’ve encountered—meant to remind you of things you likely already recognize.
Behaviors that often land in Bucket 3 include persistent refusal to collaborate, undermining colleagues through purposeless or unproductive criticism, and forcing decisions without adequate information.
Behaviors that often land in Bucket 4 include lying or misrepresenting facts to internal or external stakeholders, bullying or intimidation, manipulating processes to remove others, and misuse or misrepresentation of organizational resources.
The point is not the list. The point is whether leaders are willing to decide—and act—once patterns emerge.
Where Is the Threshold?
There is no universal answer to where the line between Buckets 3 and 4 should be drawn. Thresholds are inherently contextual.
That said, senior leaders should be able to answer two questions clearly:
Which behaviors would trigger immediate separation if they occurred?
Which behaviors warrant a time-bound opportunity to change, with separation as the next step if they persist?
Many leaders hesitate to articulate these thresholds in advance because the behaviors feel “obvious” only in hindsight. But that hindsight is a signal, not an excuse. If a behavior feels unmistakably wrong after the fact, it was likely misaligned all along.
In my experience, failure here is rarely about judgment. It is about articulation—and follow-through.
What the Research Can—and Can’t—Do for Us
Before settling on this view, I went looking for a clear, evidence-based answer to the performance-versus-culture tradeoff. I examined research on toxic employees, high performers, CEOs, and top management teams.
That literature offers useful insights into culture formation, leadership influence, and social dynamics. What it does not do is resolve the question leaders actually face: when does performance stop compensating for behavior?
The evidence is indirect and highly contextual. Research does not absolve leaders of judgment here.
As a brief aside, a colleague and friend of mine, Ted Forbes, recently explored a related idea using a nine-box framework that pairs performance with cultural role-modeling—reinforcing the same core point: culture and performance must be evaluated together, not in isolation.
On High Performers, Mid-Status Actors, and Visibility
Much of this discussion focuses on people who are perceived as valuable, senior, or hard to replace in the short term—those whose exit would create immediate disruption.
It’s worth noting, however, that research also suggests mid-status actors can be surprisingly corrosive to culture, sometimes because they are less visible and therefore less likely to be addressed.
My belief—consistent with research showing that status shapes how organizations respond to misbehavior—is that leaders are often more willing to confront or exit mid-status performers than highly valued or senior contributors, because the short-term risk of disruption feels lower.
There is an irony here. Higher-status individuals are more visible and therefore should be stronger standard-bearers. At the same time, less visible actors may do meaningful damage undetected.
That tension is real—but it’s not the central problem I’m addressing here. The issue is leadership choice.
Why Leaders Hesitate—and a Coaching Question
As senior leaders, you already know why this is hard.
You know that acting may hurt short-term performance.
You know that legal, political, or operational costs may follow.
You know that the facts are rarely clean and emotions are rarely absent.
So the more useful question is not why leaders hesitate—but what keeps you from acting once you know?
That’s the coaching question I often ask.
Tolerance and Its Consequences
When leaders tolerate behavior that violates their stated values, two things can happen.
First, tolerance can often lead to norm spread. People watch carefully to see which behaviors are truly unacceptable and which ones are quietly absorbed. When violations persist, others recalibrate their understanding of what is permissible.
Second, culture has the potential to become performative. Aspirational values lose their force when leaders cannot—or will not—address behaviors that clearly contradict them. Over time, people stop investing in what the organization claims to stand for and focus instead on what actually happens.
Culture is not shaped by aspiration alone. It is shaped through selection, socialization, and attrition—and by what leaders choose to tolerate along the way.
A Closing Thought—and an Invitation
This is what I believe based on my experience, the research I’ve examined, and the leadership decisions I’ve watched unfold.
Reasonable leaders can disagree about where lines should be drawn. That debate is healthy—and necessary.
But avoiding the decision altogether comes at a cost most organizations eventually pay.
If this dilemma is one you’re wrestling with—if a highly valued contributor’s behavior is testing your culture—I’d welcome the conversation. These are not easy calls. But they are core leadership work.
Let’s stay in conversation.