From Toxicity to Trust: Fixing the High-Performing Bully at the Root
Every leader knows this person.
They hit their numbers. They lead the meeting. They drive the project across the finish line when everyone else is flagging. On paper, they are exactly what you hired.
And they are quietly costing you more than they bring in.
The leader knows it. HR knows it. The team certainly knows it. But no one moves, because the math feels too uncomfortable. If we lose this person, what do we lose?
That is the wrong question. And the fact that it is the first question leaders ask tells you how this behavior survives. Not because organizations tolerate it on purpose. Because they cannot see the full cost of what it is costing them.
High-performing toxic behavior is a nervous system issue, not a character issue.
The behaviors we call toxic (intimidation, public shaming, relentless criticism, control, explosiveness) are almost always a dysregulated nervous system that learned to perform under threat and now inflicts threat on others. That is not an excuse. But it is a map. And maps tell you where the root is.
The real cost you are not calculating
Most organizations calculate the cost of a toxic high-performer by looking at one side of the ledger.
They see the revenue. The client wins. The individual output.
They do not calculate the invisible side:
- The senior people who quietly left rather than keep working alongside this person
- The ideas that never got raised because the team had learned it was safer to stay quiet
- The talent operating at 60% because the room’s nervous system was stuck in threat mode
- The hours that went into managing the fallout, coaching the wounded, and containing the damage
These are invisible metrics. That is exactly the problem. Who is going to raise a stink about the person who brings in the most sales? So the loss stays unmeasured, and the output stays visible, and the math always seems to favor keeping them.
The numbers, when you do run them, are not subtle. Workplace incivility costs US employers roughly $14,000 per employee per year in lost quality, disengagement, and lost productivity. (SHRM, 2025) Toxic workplace cultures have drained $223 billion from US businesses over five years. (SHRM, 2025)
And it is worse than a simple offset. De-energizing relationships hit team performance four to seven times harder than energizing ones lift it. (McKinsey, 2025) One toxic high-performer is not balanced out by three good ones. The math does not work the way leaders hope it does.
The high performer is not your asset. They are your most expensive liability, wearing an asset’s clothing.
Why feedback has not fixed it
If you are reading this, you have probably already tried feedback.
You have had the conversation. You have documented the behavior. You may have brought in HR or moved them to a different team. For a while, things looked better. Then six months later the same pattern reappeared in a slightly different form.
This is not a performance management failure. It is a neuroscience misdiagnosis.
We treat toxic behavior like a skill gap, a knowledge problem that feedback and coaching can fill. But most chronically disruptive leaders are not missing information about how to behave differently. They already know they intimidate people. They have heard it before.
The problem is not knowledge. The problem is capacity.
❌ Conventional Approach: “Give them clear feedback and consequences. They’ll adjust.”
✔ Brave Restoration: “Build the nervous system capacity underneath the behavior. The behavior changes when it no longer needs to exist.”
What is actually underneath the behavior
I want to tell you how I learned this, because I did not learn it in a textbook. I learned it in my own body.
Several years ago, when I was really struggling with anxiety, I went to a therapist. She told me, your distress tolerance is very low. And what that did, instead of helping, was trigger something in my brain that said: you’re not strong enough to handle this, so you’d better fix it.
So I did what people with low distress tolerance do. I stepped into everyone else’s lane. I could not rest until every problem was solved. Can you say workaholic? That was me.
Here is the thing. That same experience is what gave me the four-capacity diagnostic I use today.
Because distress tolerance does not live in your reasoning brain. It lives in the limbic system, the part that has stored up every memory of everything that hurt you. Especially the relational hurt. The times you were rejected. The times people laughed at you. The times you felt like you did not belong. Those memories are all in there. And instead of telling you you’re strong enough to handle that, your brain says, I never want to feel that way again, so I’m going to keep you away from anything close to it.
The problem is the same problem as any unused muscle.
A year ago I had surgery on my ankle. My leg literally shrank to about half its size, because I was not using it. What does not get used starts to atrophy. The same thing happens with our resilience muscle, our ability to handle the hard things of life. The brain thinks it is protecting us. It is actually keeping us weak.
A toxic leader is not a strong leader who occasionally loses control. Most of the time, they are a leader running on a resilience muscle that atrophied a long time ago. The control and the aggression are what they reach for because the muscle that would let them sit with difficulty is no longer there.
The four capacities toxic leaders are missing
Through the Brave Restoration framework, I look for gaps in four core capacities: Connection, Definition, Integration, and Collaboration. Chronically disruptive leaders typically have deficits in at least two, most often Connection and Integration.
Capacity for Connection
Relational Safety. The ability to trust that a relationship can hold honesty, conflict, and failure without rupturing for good. Chronically aggressive leaders often carry an implicit belief that people will abandon or betray them if given the chance. Their control is preemptive. I’ll hold the power before you can take it from me. Building this capacity means giving them repeated experiences of relationships that hold, even in difficulty.
Connection to Self. The ability to notice what is happening in their own body, the tightening chest, the flush of adrenaline, before it becomes behavior. Most toxic leaders have very low interoceptive awareness under pressure. They go from trigger to reaction with nothing in between. The work here is slowing that loop down. Building the ability to notice I’m activated before the activation becomes something they do to another person.
Capacity for Integration
Distress Tolerance. The ability to sit with uncertainty, ambiguity, or underperformance without immediately moving to control or attack. Toxic leaders have a very low window of tolerance. When something feels out of control, their nervous system cannot hold it, so it searches for something to fix, blame, or dominate. The distress becomes someone else’s problem, usually the nearest person with less power.
Accountability Without Shame. The ability to own a mistake without it triggering a shame spiral that generates more defensive or aggressive behavior. For leaders with a fragile self-concept, accountability feels like annihilation. They attack because being wrong feels like being nothing. Building this capacity means separating their worth from their performance. Slowly, carefully, and with real relational support.
These are not soft skills. They are now well-validated in the clinical literature. Distress tolerance is robustly linked to impulse control and emotion regulation, and low distress tolerance predicts the exact patterns I see in toxic leaders. (Personality and Individual Differences, 2022) Interoceptive awareness, the ability to feel what is happening inside your own body, is foundational to regulating emotion at all. (MDPI, 2024)
What happens in the brain when feedback lands
Let me walk you through what actually happens when a leader receives critical feedback, because this is where the whole thing breaks.
Remember, our brains operate from the bottom up, not the top down.
The feedback comes in through the brainstem first, which is only asking one question: is this physical life or death? Most feedback is not. So it sends it up to the limbic system. And this part asks a different question: is there a relational threat here? Feedback almost always carries a relational threat. And where there is threat, there is self-protection.
So the limbic system starts cataloging every past experience that felt anything like this one, and it makes a decision. Am I going to protect you, or are you strong enough to handle this? If you have not had many experiences where honesty stayed safe, it does not want to find out. So it picks the fast exit. Get defensive. Blame someone. Go quiet. Get angry and shut it down.
Then comes shame. And shame sends us straight to coping, because coping gives this part of the brain a quick dash of dopamine. For some people that is a drink. For some it is chocolate. For me it was burying myself in work, telling myself maybe if I just do better, this feeling goes away.
None of it convinces the brain that it is okay to fail. It just reinforces the original message. You’re not strong enough to handle this.
That is the loop a toxic leader is stuck in. Not a character flaw. A nervous system that never got the experience it needed to learn that it could survive being wrong.
Why this is so much harder for CEOs
There is a specific reason CEOs are often the last to do this work.
CEOs feel watched. They feel that the moment they make a mistake, someone is going to tear them down, because everyone is aiming for the role. That does not feel safe. And a brain that does not feel safe is not a brain that can receive critical feedback. So the easier path is to leave the toxic high-performer alone and avoid the whole conversation.
If you are a CEO, here is something I want you to hear. In some ways it is not your fault. The leaders who came before you showed you how to lead, and we tend to follow the leader we were given. Most CEOs I meet are genuinely ready for change. They just do not know how to find it.
It always has to start with feedback. And that is hard two ways. It is hard to ask for it, and it is hard for your team to give it, unless they have had experiences where they told you something true and you were able to receive it.
I had one of those experiences recently. I had to give someone in my world some hard feedback, and I was nervous, because most people cannot hold critical feedback. But this person had been working on their nervous system. They had been getting more regulated. So when I shared something they had said that was genuinely hurtful, they did not turn it on me, get defensive, or blame anyone else. They just said, “My goodness, I am so glad you shared that.”
That is what a regulated nervous system makes possible. So here is one thing you can do to start changing your culture. Start asking your team, what do I need to hear? What am I not seeing? And when someone is brave enough to tell you, your only job is to say, “Thank you for telling me. That was brave. That is so helpful.”
Because if someone cares about you enough to tell you the truth, you want them on your team. It is when they stop telling you the truth that you should be worried.
A leader I worked with this year
Let me tell you about a leader I worked with over the past year.
This leader was, in many ways, extraordinary. So willing to step into conflict. So willing to hear the hard stuff. The problem was that when they stepped into it, they did it with such force that it shut everyone else down.
After six to eight months together, we started to see where it came from. As a child, and even as a young adult, this leader had gone through some really hard things, and there had been no one looking out for them. They had to take care of themselves. And somewhere in there they learned that when they just took over, they could control the outcome. So the brain said, that felt better, let’s keep doing that.
What looked like a leader with enormous distress tolerance was actually a leader with very low distress tolerance.
Here is what did not help. Telling that leader to be more calm. They knew. They would say it themselves: I just lose it when I get in the middle of it.
Here is what did help. Helping that leader connect to what was actually hurting underneath, and what that part of their brain truly needed, which was for someone to step up and say, I see you. You don’t have to be the one who takes over. Someone else can carry this. They needed to be seen and understood. And they needed to learn that even when they messed up, the relationship would stay close.
It is amazing how that started to change things. The leader began to de-escalate. They stopped losing it in the middle of conflict. And it all started with one decision. The decision to get curious, and to take the risk of asking their team: What do I need to know? What am I not seeing?
That is the root work. Not a finish line. The beginning of a genuinely different relationship with power.
What leaders need to know before they begin
Not every toxic leader will do this work. You have to be honest about that.
The conditions that make it possible:
The leader has to genuinely want something to be different. Not because they were told to. Not only because their job depends on it, though that may be part of it. Because some part of them is tired. Tired of the alienation. Tired of the transactional relationships. Tired of being impressive and still somehow alone in the room.
The organization has to hold the accountability piece clearly. This work is not an alternative to consequences. It is what happens alongside clear expectations. The leader must know the behavior is not acceptable, and also have a genuine path forward.
The process has to go slow enough to build real capacity. This is not a workshop or a personality assessment debrief. It is repeated, relational work that reshapes how a nervous system moves through difficulty. That takes time.
When it is not repairable
Sometimes it is not.
Some leaders lack the insight, the motivation, or the genuine desire to change. Some cultures are so organized around the toxic leader’s output that the system itself resists the restoration. In those cases, the bravest move is clarity. This is not working, it will not work, and the organization has to make a different decision.
What I push against is using the difficulty of this work as a reason to avoid it entirely. Letting the pattern continue because the math on the output feels too important to disrupt.
The question is never can we afford to fix this?
The real question is what is it costing us to leave it as it is?
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a high-performing toxic leader a character problem or a skill problem?
Neither. It is a capacity problem. Most chronically disruptive leaders already know how their behavior affects people. They are not missing information. They are missing the nervous system capacity to hold distress, stay relationally safe, notice their own activation, and be accountable without spiraling into shame. Feedback fills knowledge gaps. It cannot build capacity.
Why doesn’t feedback fix toxic behavior?
Because feedback operates at the level of behavior, and the behavior is downstream of a dysregulated nervous system. When critical feedback arrives, the leader’s limbic system reads relational threat and moves into self-protection: defensiveness, blame, withdrawal, or attack, followed by shame and coping. Until the underlying capacity is built, feedback just triggers the loop it was meant to fix.
What are the four capacities you assess?
I assess a leader’s capacity for Connection, Definition, Integration, and Collaboration. The issues this article focuses on, distress tolerance, relational safety, self-awareness under stress, and accountability without shame, fall under Connection and Integration. All four work together, and the work is to build the missing ones through repeated relational experience, not through performance plans or one-off coaching.
How long does this work take?
Months, not weeks, and the pace is set by the leader’s nervous system, not the strategy deck. The leader I described above began to change after six to eight months of work, once we found the root. Early signals show up sooner: the leader starts naming their own activation, asking what they are not seeing, and staying in relationship after a mistake instead of pulling away.
When should an organization stop and make a different decision?
When the leader lacks the insight, the motivation, or the genuine desire to change, or when the culture is so built around their output that it resists the work. The difficulty of the work is not a reason to avoid it. But a leader who does not want it cannot be coerced into it. Coercion produces performance, not change.
THE ASK: Think about the high-performer on your team who carries the most relational cost. What is the real number? Not just their output, but the aggregate of what their behavior extracts from everyone around them. Have you ever actually calculated it?
THE DO: Have a conversation with one person who works closely with that leader. Not to build a case. To listen. Ask them, “What does it cost you to work in that person’s orbit?” Then sit with what you hear without moving to defend, explain, or fix. Let the data land first.
References
- SHRM. (2025). The Cost of Incivility: Addressing Workplace Challenges into 2025. shrm.org
- SHRM. (2025). Toxic Workplace Cultures Are Costing Employers Billions. shrm.org
- Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2013). The price of incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91(1–2). hbr.org
- McKinsey & Company. (2025). The hidden toll of workplace incivility. mckinsey.com
- Price, S., et al. (2018). Interoceptive awareness skills for emotion regulation (MABT). Frontiers in Psychology. nih.gov
- Distress tolerance and stress-induced emotion regulation behavior (2022). Personality and Individual Differences. sciencedirect.com
- Interoceptive ability and emotion regulation in mind–body interventions: an integrative review (2024). MDPI. mdpi.com
- Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. nih.gov
If you recognize this pattern in someone on your team, or in yourself, that recognition is the opening. The work starts with one honest question.