One frustration comes up again and again when I speak to employees, and it is not always the one leaders expect. It is not usually about a single decision, a difficult period or even a heavy workload. It is about inconsistency, and in particular the sense that some people are allowed to behave in ways that would never be accepted from everyone else.
Whether I am facilitating focus groups, carrying out Investors in People assessments or simply talking to employees about their experience of work, this theme appears surprisingly often. People can accept difficult decisions, high expectations and periods of significant change. What they struggle with is seeing one set of standards applied to some people and a completely different set applied to others.
Most leaders do not deliberately create cultures where poor behaviour is tolerated. Many have invested real time in defining values, talking about expected behaviours and describing the culture they want to build. Yet many organisations eventually face an uncomfortable truth: somewhere in the business, an individual appears to operate under a different set of rules.
When Performance Becomes a Shield
That individual may be a top salesperson, a technical specialist, a senior manager or someone whose knowledge and experience have made them seem indispensable. Their contribution is visible, their achievements are recognised and their results are difficult to ignore. The challenge is that alongside those successes comes behaviour that leaves colleagues frustrated, managers exhausted and teams wondering why standards seem to apply differently depending on who you are.
Leaders often know what is happening. They have heard the concerns, understand why people are frustrated and can see the effect on the wider team. But they also know what the individual delivers, and that is where the compromise starts.
- They are difficult, but brilliant at what they do
- Nobody else could do what they do
- They are too important to lose
- We need to pick our battles
- That is just who they are
The intention is often understandable. Leaders may be trying to protect performance, avoid disruption or retain someone they believe is critical to the organisation. But what starts as a practical decision can slowly turn into something far more damaging.
Every time behaviour is excused because someone delivers results, an exception is created. Colleagues notice those exceptions, teams discuss them and people draw their own conclusions about what the organisation really values.
The Unwritten Deal Everyone Understands
Accepting people for who they are can sound like the right thing to do. Organisations are full of different personalities, communication styles and ways of working, and not everyone will be naturally easy to manage. That difference can be valuable, but it becomes a problem when "that is just who they are" is used to excuse behaviour that damages other people.
There is a significant difference between accepting somebody's personality and accepting behaviour that damages relationships, undermines colleagues or consistently falls short of the standards expected of everyone else. When leaders repeatedly ask others to adapt around one individual's behaviour rather than expecting that individual to change, an unwritten deal begins to emerge.
The organisation overlooks poor behaviour because the individual generates revenue, delivers projects or brings expertise that others cannot easily replace. In return, the individual learns that normal expectations do not necessarily apply to them. Meanwhile, everyone else learns something equally important: performance appears to matter more than values.
The Messages People Take Away
People pay far more attention to what leaders do than what leaders say. Values may be displayed on office walls, discussed during away days and highlighted in internal communications, but employees look for evidence that those values actually influence decisions.
When they see one individual repeatedly protected from accountability, they begin drawing conclusions. Behaviour challenged in others is tolerated in certain individuals; exceptions are granted, standards relaxed and consequences avoided. Gradually, the conversation stops being about the individual and becomes a question of fairness, consistency and trust.
That is usually when trust begins to weaken. A compromise that may have seemed isolated at first becomes a visible contradiction, and visible contradictions damage confidence in leadership quickly because people stop listening to what leaders say and start believing what they see.
The Costs Nobody Measures
Most organisations measure high performance easily. Revenue, sales, productivity and project delivery all show up somewhere. The harder question is what happens around that performance: the relationships damaged, the trust weakened and the culture slowly pulled away from what leaders say they are trying to build.
Nobody is counting the ideas that never get shared because people no longer feel comfortable speaking up. Few organisations understand how much management time is spent navigating conflict, repairing damaged relationships or dealing with the fallout from behaviour that should have been challenged much earlier.
In some cases, organisations become so focused on retaining the individual they believe they cannot afford to lose that they fail to notice the steady departure of capable and committed people who have simply become tired of the inconsistency.
The People Holding Things Together
The people who receive the least attention are often the ones strengthening the organisation every day. They are willing to help, develop others, build trust, share knowledge and demonstrate the behaviours leaders say they value. Their contribution may be less visible than the star performer who dominates conversations, but it is frequently far more important to the long-term health of the organisation.
If organisations are serious about values, they need to become far more deliberate about recognising these everyday contributions. Culture is shaped by daily decisions about what gets noticed, what gets rewarded and what leaders choose to celebrate.
The Real Leadership Test
This is not really an article about difficult employees. They will always exist. The real question is what leaders do when someone's results are strong but their behaviour damages the people around them.
Every leader faces moments when they must decide whether organisational values genuinely apply to everyone or whether exceptions will be made for those perceived as valuable enough. Those moments reveal more about an organisation's culture than any values statement ever will.
If leaders want values to mean something, they have to be prepared to have difficult conversations with people they would rather avoid. They have to address behaviours that undermine trust, even when the individual involved is delivering exceptional results. Most importantly, they need to model the standards they expect from others.