Read: 2 min
Highlight: Your best employee might be making everyone else worse.
Welcome to Climate CEOs: Actionable insights from my work with 300+ climate CEOs on growth, capital, and leadership.
One of the company’s most valuable executives was brilliant.
They had helped build the company for years. They knew things nobody else knew.
So far, so good.
There was just one problem.
Their EQ was way lower than their IQ.
Managing tech? No problem.
Managing people? Lots of problems.
Turns out humans are harder to engineer.
So should you fire them?
Maybe.
But “fire toxic people immediately” is easy advice from people who don’t have to run your VC-backed startup.
24/7.
Removing a critical executive creates its own problems: lost knowledge, customer uncertainty, team disruption, and investor leverage.
The better question:
Four things I’d do:
Stop asking, “How good is this person?”
Ask: “What happens to everyone else’s performance because this person is here?”
You’re optimizing for enterprise value, not individual relationships.
Optimize the system, not the component.
Someone can be a superhero at getting a company from zero to one. And terrible at getting it from one to 100.
That doesn’t mean you made a hiring mistake.
The company changed. The job changed. Maybe they changed, too.
Yesterday’s perfect energy technology can become tomorrow’s stranded asset. So can talent.
If the person owns key relationships, knowledge, or execution, an immediate exit can create more damage than it solves.
Build the transition plan. Recruit the successor. Protect their direct reports.
Quickly.
But…
Urgency ≠ recklessness.
This matters when negotiating a graceful exit.
It’s not about your logic. It’s about theirs.
Money isn’t everyone’s primary currency.
It might be status. Power. Reputation. Mission.
And crafting the story they tell themselves, or the world, about what happened.
Do I feel more sadness? Or relief?
You may feel both.
But relief is data.
Make it a great week. It’s usually a choice.
Climate CEO Coach, Founder, Investor, Board Member, Professor
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P.S. Zen Zone: Which are you solving for: “freedom to” vs. “freedom from”?
P.P.S. Climate CEOs podcast: The Ocean’s Billion-Ton Carbon Removal Opportunity | Gigablue: What if the cheapest, largest carbon removal machine on Earth isn’t a factory, but phytoplankton in the ocean? A $20M Series A says they might be right.
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