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This article is based on a conversation between Brad Bialy and Mike Cleland on Take the Stage, a podcast/vodcast presented by Haley Marketing. For this episode and others search for “Secrets of Staffing Success” on your preferred podcast player or watch past episodes on YouTube.
Your highest-performing sales person generates most of your sales. But … he’s also toxic to your team’s culture. What do you do?
According to Mike Cleland, the answer is clear: you let him go.
No matter how much revenue they’re generating, the long-term cost of keeping them on board will devastate your firm. Toxic top performers erode trust, break accountability, and poison the culture from within.
“If somebody’s a top performer, but they’re a tumor on the culture… you can’t keep them,” Mike said. “You lose that entire dynamic of mutual accountability, and the culture of performance just atrophies and falls apart.” And once your culture begins to erode, rebuilding it is one of the hardest challenges your company can face.
“There is nothing harder than fixing the culture of a company. It’s the hardest thing that I do,” said Mike.
Don’t Compromise Your Values
The real issue with a toxic teammate isn’t about attitude. It’s about leadership. When executives tolerate behavior that undermines the company’s stated values, they’re sending a message: values only matter until someone becomes too valuable to hold accountable.
“If you have values within an organization … and you are willing to have a price tag on those—‘these values only count if you make under $700,000 of gross profit’—then they’re not values,” Mike explained. “There’s nothing transcendent anymore.”
Make no mistake.Your people are watching.
“When you’re a leader, you are a fishbowl,” Mike said. “They’re watching your body language, they’re watching how you handle things, and they’re talking about it.”
Letting a toxic performer stay too long doesn’t just damage morale—it damages your credibility as a leader. When you finally take action, you won’t hear resistance from the team. You’ll hear something worse: “What took you so long?”
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A Healthy Culture Drives Performance
For Cleland, culture isn’t just a “nice to have.” It’s the linchpin of every high-performing staffing firm. “You have a culture whether it’s intentional or not,” he said. “And you have to decide: what is it?”
Creating a culture of trust, shared expectations, and high performance takes effort. But it’s also what enables small and mid-sized firms to punch above their weight. “Grit can get you somewhere in this business. And a great culture can get you somewhere in this business.”
What’s Next?
In Part 6, the final post in this series, Mike Cleland shares the red flags of struggling firms, the traits of successful ones, and how small staffing companies can win against industry giants.
The post Culture is Everything: a Conversation with Mike Cleland appeared first on Haley Marketing Group.
