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

Trouble in Paradise? REMOVE TOXIC Employees!

9 May 2023 · 1 min

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Cameron Herold advises leaders to actively remove underperforming or toxic employees to protect company culture, arguing that firing should be treated with the same effort and urgency as hiring. He uses a medical metaphor (cancerous tumor) to stress swift, respectful removal and recommends periodic reviews of the organization to identify such people.

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So Jim Collins in his book Good to Great talked about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and everybody in the right seats. But he didn't teach us how to do it. And I've not found a single company yet anywhere that works hard enough to get the wrong people off the bus. And the reality is we have to work as hard at firing the wrong people as we do at hiring the right people. We have to get the cultural cancers out of our company. Almost like a doctor saying to you, hey, you've got a cancerous tumor in your body. How long would you leave it there? You'd have that sucker out right away. You, you have to spend time every few months looking across the organization for the underperformers or the toxic people and work to remove them out of the company as fast as possible and in a respectful way for them as well. But you have to get them out.