Dealing With a Toxic High Performer

The hardest call I have made in field leadership was not firing someone underperforming. Those calls are clean. The hard call is the one everyone at the regional level is quietly avoiding. The general manager whose numbers are strong, whose location hits every P&L target you hand them, and who is silently stripping the team around them. The toxic high performer. Every multi-unit operator I know has run into one. Most keep them too long. I did, once, and it cost me two assistant managers, a head chef, and about eighteen months of bench I never fully rebuilt. This is the piece I wish somebody had put in front of me then.

What "toxic" actually means

Before we go anywhere, we have to be precise. "Toxic" is a word that gets thrown around loosely, and loose language is what lets these people stay in seats for years longer than they should. A toxic high performer is not someone with a spiky personality. Not someone who gives hard feedback. Not someone who disagrees with you in a meeting. Those people are usually the ones you want more of.

A toxic high performer is someone whose behavior costs the team more than their output creates. That definition does the work if you take it seriously. The specific behaviors look like this:

• Information hoarding. They keep vendor contacts, recipe adjustments, scheduling logic, and P&L insights inside their own head so nobody else in the unit can be measured against their bench.
• Contempt for peers. Off-hand comments about other general managers, other units, or other functions. The kind of remark a new assistant manager hears and quietly files away.
• Closed-door humiliation. They will never yell at someone in front of you. They will yell at them ten minutes after you leave. You find out from the tenth departing prep cook, not the first.
• Punishing dissent. Line cooks who raise a safety concern get moved to a worse section the next week. Nothing is documented. Nothing is provable. Everyone in the kitchen knows.
• Blaming down and taking credit up. Every unit win is theirs. Every unit miss is somebody they can name.

None of these show up on the P&L. That is the whole problem. The P&L is a lagging indicator of a culture that is already dying, and by the time it moves the number, you are two quarters behind the damage.

The math nobody wants to run

Here is why this decision gets postponed for so long, and why the postponement is almost always the wrong call.

A top-quartile general manager in a $6M restaurant unit is worth, at the operating line, somewhere around 3 to 5 points of contribution margin over a median general manager. Call it $200K to $300K a year in real EBITDA. That is a large number and it is why you hesitate. Losing it feels like a self-inflicted wound.

Now run the other side of the ledger. A hostile shift culture costs you, at minimum, in three places:

• Turnover. In hospitality, replacing one hourly line employee runs $2K to $4K, all in. Replacing a salaried assistant manager runs $8K to $15K. A toxic general manager will move you 8 to 15 points of extra annual turnover across a 40-person team. That is $40K to $80K a year in direct replacement cost, before you count the productivity gap of every new hire climbing the learning curve.
• Silence. Nobody tells you about the walk-in gasket that has been failing for a week. Nobody flags that the closing checklist has been getting shortened. Nobody warns you that a section captain has been telling guests the truffle special is out when it is not, because they do not want to plate it. Every one of these silences is a P&L event that lands six weeks later as a variance you cannot explain.
• Hidden problems. Health department violations that come out of nowhere. A regretted resignation from a two-year server. A guest complaint chain that traces back to a shift you never heard about. These are compound-interest costs. They accumulate quietly until they land loud.

Add it up straight and the toxic high performer is usually running you a hidden $150K to $250K a year in cost, on top of what they produce. And that is only the year you can see. The two-deep bench you were supposed to be building underneath them is not being built. When they leave, and they will, you are two positions deep in nobody. At Hana I was running 21 units across six states. The units where the two-deep bench was real ran themselves for a quarter when a general manager left. The units where a toxic general manager had blocked the bench took two quarters to reopen.

The four-step process

Here is the sequence I run now. It is deliberately slow at the front and deliberately fast at the back. That order matters.

1. Name it privately (30 days)

The first conversation is one on one, at their unit, off-hours, no witnesses. You are not delivering a warning. You are naming the pattern. Specific. Behavioral. Not "you have a leadership problem," but "in the last six weeks I have had three assistant managers tell me they felt cut off at pass, and two prep cooks tell me they were reassigned after raising a food safety concern. I am not asking you to defend the specifics. I am telling you what I am seeing and asking you to sit with it for a week."

Then you leave. You do not solve it in the room. Half the time, a self-aware general manager comes back and says "I have been under too much pressure and taking it out on the team, I need help." That half of the time is why this step exists.

2. Set the behavior contract (60 days, written)

If they do not self-correct in the first 30 days, the second step is written. Not HR-driven. Operator-driven. A one-page document, signed by both of you, that names three to five specific behaviors, defines the observable evidence of change, and sets a 60-day review date. Examples:

• "Every schedule for the next 60 days will be built collaboratively with the assistant general manager, not solo."
• "Every closing shift will end with a five-minute team debrief, and the notes will be shared to the regional folder within 24 hours."
• "Zero disciplinary conversations will be held off-camera or off-record. Any coaching moment gets documented same day."

The behaviors have to be things the general manager can actually control by tomorrow morning. If the contract reads like "be less negative," you have written a document that cannot be honored. Concrete and observable, or it does not count.

3. Watch for the tell

Somewhere inside the 60-day window there is a tell, and once you know to look for it, it is unmistakable.

The tell is whether they close ranks or open up. A general manager who is going to make it becomes, in that 60-day period, more visible to their team, not less. They ask their assistant manager to run the pre-shift. They put someone else in front of the vendor rep. They stop being the smartest voice in the room. Their unit does not get worse. It gets more porous. Other people are suddenly allowed to be good at things.

A general manager who is not going to make it does the opposite. They close ranks. They become politer to you and colder to the team. They document their wins. They start building a case. The behavior improves on the surface. The culture underneath keeps decaying, and you can feel it in the way the assistant manager will not make eye contact with you on the walk-through.

You are not looking for compliance with the contract. You are looking for direction of travel. Closing ranks means the answer is no.

The behavior contract is not the test. The direction of travel is the test. A general manager who is going to make it becomes more visible to their team. A general manager who is not becomes more visible to you.

4. Decide (day 90)

At day 90, you decide. Not day 120. Not "let's give it one more quarter." At 90 days, you sit down alone with the file, and you make the call.

If the direction of travel is right, you commit publicly. You tell the team, in some form, that the general manager has been doing hard work on how they lead and that you back them. That public commitment matters. It rebuilds the credit line.

If the direction of travel is wrong, you move. You move fast, you move with respect, and you move without a public post-mortem. The team will fill in the reasons themselves, and they will fill them in accurately.

The common mistake: "but the numbers"

The single most common mistake I see other operators make here, and that I have made myself, is keeping the person because the numbers are strong. "I cannot afford to lose that unit's P&L." "We do not have a replacement." "The next 90 days are peak season."

The numbers are lying to you. Not in the arithmetic sense. In the causal sense. What the P&L is showing you is the sum of the general manager's output and the compound cost of the culture they are creating, but it is only showing you the output side clearly. The cost side is invisible on the report you are reading. It shows up two quarters later, as unexplained variance, as a wave of turnover, as a two-deep bench that suddenly has nobody in it.

Every time I have kept a toxic high performer past the day-90 decision date, the numbers have declined within two quarters anyway. Every time. The output was always temporary because it was being subsidized by a team that was quietly bleeding out.

The one that cost me

The Bay Area unit I keep coming back to had a general manager who was, on paper, my best operator. Top of the group on food cost, top on labor, best guest scores of the five locations we ran during the Zareen's turnaround. And I could feel the temperature drop every time I walked into that kitchen. Line cooks stopped mid-sentence when the general manager walked past. The assistant general manager had stopped asking for feedback and started copying me on every email.

I did the first step, sort of. I named it privately. I did not do the second step properly. I let the written contract slip. I let a month become three. The unit kept posting strong numbers, and I told myself the peak catering season for the Stanford and Meta accounts was not the time to introduce noise. During those three months, my assistant general manager, my head chef, and my strongest sous chef all resigned in a six-week window. Every one of them cited the general manager in the exit interview. Every one of them told me they had been trying to signal it for months.

When I finally moved the general manager, the numbers at that unit dropped for two quarters, because I had to rebuild a bench that was now empty. The unit that had been my strongest became my hardest reopen. The $4.9M turnaround across the group would have landed closer to $5.4M if I had moved on time. That $500K delta is the price of the postponed decision.

If I had run the four steps on time, I would have moved by month four, kept my assistant general manager and my head chef. The math is not close.

The point

A toxic high performer is the hardest personnel call in multi-unit operations because both sides of the decision look expensive. Keeping them looks expensive because you can see what they produce. Moving them looks expensive because you can see the hole they leave.

The numbers are lying. What you cannot see, and what will land on your P&L two quarters late, is the cost of what they are doing to the people around them. The team is a compounding asset, and every month you wait is a month you are borrowing against a bench you have not built.

Name it privately in 30 days. Contract it in writing over 60. Watch the direction of travel. Decide at day 90. Do not keep them because of the numbers. The numbers are the cover, not the reason.