Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

The Leadership Blind Spot Ruining Your Culture

21 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this talk, Cameron Herold emphasizes that the people side of a business—covering recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding—is essential and should be treated as a full‑life‑cycle system. He references the "Good to Great" mantra of getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off, and placing everyone in the right seats, explaining that having the wrong people can ruin a company's journey. Herold points out a pervasive blind spot: despite discussing recruitment and culture, most companies lack effective systems to swiftly remove toxic, underperforming "C‑players" from the organization. Drawing on his experience coaching companies in 29 countries, he notes that no organization he’s encountered has dedicated sufficient time or processes to eliminate these detrimental employees, which ultimately harms culture and performance.

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The people side of your business is critical. And when I talk about people, I talk about the recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding. It's the full life cycle of people are the people systems you need to have inside of your company. Who's here has heard of the saying in the book Good to Great, get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and everybody in the right seats. This is the bus. The reason their mantra was so important was you're either part of the scene or you're not. You either get it or you don't. You're either on the bus or off the bus, and they knew that if they had the wrong people on the bus, it would ruin the trip. Literally. That's where the mantra came from. But I have never found a company yet in all the companies I've worked with in 29 countries around the world where I've coached companies, I've never found a single company that puts enough time and systems in place to get rid of the toxic underperformers fast enough. We talk about recruiting, we talk about onboarding, we talk about culture, but we don't talk about getting rid of the toxic underperforming C players inside of your organization.