The executive I had dinner with started talking about public swimming pools.
Public pools can close for hours when one person decides to use it as a bathroom.
Nobody stands at the fence arguing that the rest of the water is fine.
You wouldn’t get in the pool if you knew the water was badly contaminated due to lots of people. And you wouldn’t get in if you knew about a single incident either.
The tolerance level is zero.
We accept the tolerance level is zero instantly when it’s a pool.
We rarely apply it to a team.
The analogy, although it might be a bit crude, is pretty spot on.
You already know who it is
Every leader reading this can picture the person at work who is the equivalent of contaminating the water in a public pool.
Often they’re actually a strong performer. They hit their numbers, ship the work, or know the systems that nobody else has bothered to learn.
And so the whole team quietly works around them.
People re-read the same email four times before they send it to them, hoping it won’t set them off.
Meetings get pre-briefed so there are no surprises.
Someone raises a problem with you and then asks you not to say where it came from.
That isn’t a personality quirk to be managed, but a silent tax you and your team are paying.
GE had a 2x2 grid for this
When I worked at GE, we assessed people on two axes: performance and values.
Four quadrants.
High performance + High values = Promote them, give them the best training, best assignments, work hardest to keep them
Low performance + Low values = Exit, as quickly as you reasonably can
Two of those calls are pretty easy.
Few leaders agonise over either of those.
What an organisation does with the other two quadrants though tells you what it actually believes.
Low performance + High values. GE gave these people a real second chance to lift their performance. This often included more personalised coaching, sometimes even a different role, and time to lift into the “top right box” and become a star.
High performance + Low values. It might seem controversial, but GE exited them. We all knew stories about someone who smashed all their targets and was still asked to leave the company.
The fourth box is where most organisations flinch
That fourth call is the hard one, and it’s the one most organisations talk themselves out of.
The person is delivering. The pipeline depends on them, or the platform does, or the client relationship does.
Replacing them looks expensive and slow.
So the behaviour gets reframed as a style issue, or robust standards, or just how they are.
GE’s position was that a strong result doesn’t buy you the right to poor behaviour. Because the behaviour doesn’t stay in one place. It spreads, it sets the standard for what’s acceptable, and it does most of its damage to exactly the people you want to keep the most.
Your quadrant-one people are watching. They’re the ones who always have options.
Your best people are very conscious of what you tolerate.
What it costs, and where the cost hides
The awkward part is that this cost never shows up in a report.
You’ll see it eventually in attrition, in a slow quarter, in a project that should have gone better. But by then it looks like a delivery problem.
This is also where it collides with everything else on your plate right now.
You can buy every AI tool going around. You can run the pilots, fund the licences, and put a strategic roadmap in front of the Board.
A disengaged team will run all of it though at half power.
Engagement is the quiet multiplier on every other investment you make.
It rarely gets a line in the business case, and often it decides how much of that business case you actually realise.
My own litmus test
I keep a rough count of how many people reach out to me each month wanting to have a coffee and talk about their next career move.
That number has been steadily climbing over the past 12 months.
As it tips further towards an employer’s market, some leaders will assume the pressure works in their favour, and that people will simply put up with more.
I think that’s the wrong way of looking at things.
The organisations that win are the ones with engaged people who choose to go the extra mile. Not people staying because leaving looks hard right now.
Fear gets you compliance.
It rarely gets you discretionary effort, and discretionary effort is where the outcomes live.
The one thing worth doing this week
Picture your own two-by-two. Put every name in one of the four boxes.
Then look at the high performance + low values box and ask yourself how long that person has been sitting there, and what it’s costing the people around them.
Most leaders already know the name. The question is what they do next.
Every week, I share what I see. Subscribe and see it too.
Tina Paterson is the founder of Outcomes Over Hours. She partners with tech leaders and their leadership teams to deliver the right outcomes faster and easier.
Because humans who strategically leverage AI will always win.
How I make my Substack articles
I do the thinking. Claude is my sparring partner, and sometimes it pulls my thinking into a first draft. Then I speak my own version over the top using Wispr Flow (which is ~4x faster than typing) and I tweak it until it sounds absolutely like me and covers what I want to share to help you as a tech leader in a large organisation.
Because humans who strategically leverage AI will always win.
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