What do you do when you're trying to build a culture of respect, high performance, accountability, and fun - what I call a Superbowl culture - and that culture gets challenged by someone whose work is great but whose Mindset (how they behave) is below the bar?

That's the question I want to work through here, using three real scenarios.

Three Quick Scenarios

I have a custom manufacturing client, and in our first quarter working together, we defined the Mindset they wanted running through the company. Specifically, how everyone's thinking needed to overlap in a way that showed up in how they treated customers, each other, how they approached their work, and how they faced challenges. Their best fabricator, genuinely the best hands on the floor, pushed back and told the owners they were headed in the wrong direction. Quality production had always been the only standard he'd needed to meet in the past. Now he understood he was going to be held accountable for his Mindset too.

A client service rep at another company was servicing north of a million dollars in billings a year. Her clients loved her, but she was difficult for her peers. Anything she didn't like, she'd display pouty, passive-aggressive behavior that made everyone around her uncomfortable. One of the leaders told me, almost apologetically, "She is going to work the way she is going to work. She keeps the billing up. Don't talk to me about anything else."

And the third one is mine. Years ago, I owned a recruiting firm and I had a producer, third largest in the company, who was excellent at the job and would bring personal issues into the office. He had a combative edge that had nothing to do with placements and everything to do with whatever he was carrying that day. I'll be honest: it took me way too long to deal with it, and I wasn't equipped to step into that conversation without making it worse.

Three industries. Three different people. Same exact test: each of them had, somewhere along the way, come to believe that being excellent at the craft meant the rest of the rules were optional, or at least that they could get away with poor behavior. There's a price to be paid when we tolerate a poor Mindset just because someone is getting good results.

Some of the Costs

With my manufacturing client, the fabricator opted to leave on his own within days of the new standard being set. The owners felt relief. Everyone did. They also realized they'd probably lost a few good employees in the past because of him and had been about to lose another one. Between past turnover, lower production, absenteeism, and leadership time pulled away from bigger things, it had easily cost tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe a lot more.

At my recruiting firm, I remember pulling up to the office some mornings and feeling a giant weight, not wanting to go in because I didn't want to deal with whatever that person was going to bring that day. Twenty years ago, I didn't have the wisdom or the skills to do a proper reset, so I just fired him. Looking back, I think it was fortunate I didn't wait any longer to make that call. I later learned my second-biggest producer, an amazing person, had already started interviewing elsewhere because she didn't want to keep coming to work there either. Between what I lost from him and what I nearly lost in her; the real number was well into the tens of thousands.

That's real, hidden cost in both cases.

Before I get to what happened with the client service rep, I want to be clear about something: this next part is about you, if you're the leader. This is a leadership problem, not an employee problem. Fix the leadership problem, and the employee problem tends to fix itself.

The Head Trash

Here's what I actually want to spend the most time on, because "hold people accountable" is advice you've heard a thousand times. If it were that simple, none of these three situations would have dragged on as long as they did.

What actually stops leaders isn't a lack of advice. It's head trash, the stuff running in your head that talks you out of the conversation before you ever get to have it.

Behind the excuses for tolerating a poor Mindset is a fear that it won't go well and the person might quit.

We don't say that part out loud. Instead, we think, "it's a bad time to address this," really meaning we're too busy to be without them right now. We think, "no one else knows how to do their job," really meaning they feel irreplaceable. We think, "they're going through something hard personally," really meaning once they work through it, they'll come back with the right attitude.

All of these things may be true but they're head trash, nonetheless.

Head trash never announces itself as fear. It shows up dressed as something reasonable: patience, loyalty, not wanting to overreact, waiting for the right time. That's exactly what makes it so effective. You don't feel like you're avoiding the problem. You feel like you're being a good leader about it. Right up until you look back and see how much it actually cost you.

What to Do Instead

Create Clarity

It starts before any hard conversation ever happens. The first move is creating real clarity around your company's Mindset, your shared behaviors, the same thing we did with the manufacturing company.

You cannot hold someone accountable to a standard that was never made explicit. Most companies have values on a wall, maybe on their website, but not in their DNA. What you need instead is clarity on what it looks like when someone is genuinely living the Mindset, and what it looks like when they're not.

Without that, every accountability conversation starts as a debate about whether the standard even exists. With it, the conversation is much simpler: here's the standard, here's where you are, here's how you close the gap.

Give Feedback Every Time

Second: give people feedback, good or bad, as soon as they've earned it. Every time, not just when it's convenient.

This is where all three of these situations actually broke down. Nobody gave the fabricator real-time feedback the moment his attitude showed up. Nobody addressed it the first time the client service rep got passive-aggressive with a peer. I didn't say anything to my producer the first time his mood showed up in the office. I waited and let a single correctable moment become a pattern instead.

Feedback delayed doesn't just lose urgency. It teaches the person the behavior is tolerated because your silence is data too. If you go quiet, they hear "this is fine," whether you meant to say that or not.

Make It Non-Negotiable

Third, and this is the move that protects everything else you build: for the long-term good of the company, the Mindset has to be non-negotiable. Not negotiable for your newest hire, and not negotiable for your best fabricator, your million-dollar biller, or your top producer.

Here's the line I keep coming back to: if your standards don't apply to your best people, they aren't real standards. They're suggestions for everyone except the people who feel too difficult to replace.

Non-negotiable doesn't mean you fire someone the first time they slip. It means the standard itself never bends, no matter how tempting, safe, or reasonable it feels to make an exception. The moment you make an exception for your best performer; you haven't protected them. You've quietly told everyone else what the real rules are.

What Actually Happened With the Client Service Rep

Non-negotiable doesn't mean infallible, though. Sometimes what looks like someone else's Mindset problem is actually a clarity problem you created, and that's exactly what happened here.

When the leaders actually examined the role she was in, they realized they were asking more of her than of her peers. She had the largest, most challenging clients. Her role genuinely fit into a different category, and what "killing it" looked like in that seat wasn't the same as it was for everyone else. The misaligned expectations were quietly feeding the Mindset gap.

The leaders owned their part. They updated her performance expectations and had the honest conversation about the Mindset gap at the same time. It led to a good outcome for everyone, which is really the last thing worth saying here.

It's a Skill, Not Just a Value

Creating clarity, coaching, and giving feedback are, in large part, skills. You have to have the heart and desire to be a good leader, but it all starts with clarity.

That's a simple idea, not an easy one.

You have to articulate, consistently and often, the expected Mindset: your company's actual way of thinking and behaving. And you have to hold people accountable to it with feedback and coaching, and occasionally an invitation to leave the company.

So go back to the question we started with. You're trying to build a culture of respect, high performance, accountability, and fun because that's what makes a great company, and somebody whose individual work is already great is testing whether that culture actually applies to them.

The honest answer probably isn't that you need a better strategy for that one moment. It's that you need to catch the head trash that's been running before you ever get there: get clear on the Mindset ahead of time, give feedback the moment it's earned, and hold the line as non-negotiable, even when it's your best person standing in front of you.

So, ask yourself: which one of these three are you skipping right now?


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