I was reminded of this some years ago when one of my managers came to me for advice about the best performing rep on his team. Nine months into the role, she had comfortably overachieved on her quota. She was also, by a large distance, the most disruptive person in the business.

Solutions Engineers were refusing to work with her on her deals as they felt disrespected and under valued. Customer Success felt they were being pushed out of their own accounts. There had been multiple HR investigations into her behaviour. The manager had hired her knowing her reputation, and while her history suggested it would unfold like this, he believed he could manage her in a way others hadn't. When I asked him why he had taken the risk, the answer was honest and familiar - he needed the performance impact.

The problem started with the hire

It would be easy to frame this as a story about a difficult rep, but that isn't really what it was. She didn't create the problem. It was created the day she was hired for her number, in the hope that her behaviour would somehow be different this time. That is a leadership decision, and most of us have made a version of it when the pressure of a target has been heavy enough to carry.

The true cost of 140%

My coaching advice to the manager was that we needed to cut our losses. It wasn't a comfortable call.

By that point, though, it had stopped being about her. The behaviour was spreading, other teams were working around her, and people across the company had begun to judge his leadership by what he was prepared to tolerate rather than by what he was delivering. Her dashboard said 140%, but it didn't account for the SE hours lost, the strain on customer relationships, the time spent on HR investigations, or the good people who were quietly starting to look elsewhere for their next role. Once you factor all of that in, it's worth asking what her real number was.

Letting her go put his team's quota at risk, and because his number rolled up into mine, it put my own at risk too. I deliberately chose to use the word "we" rather than "he" so that he felt that we were in this together and not alone.

We anchored the conversation in the two values we had both committed to, integrity and trust. If nothing changed, we would be compromising both, and every rep watching would conclude that our values were negotiable once you hit your number. She had to go.

We reward the behaviour we say we don't want

I think we also need to be honest about how most sales organisations treat this type of person. We send them to President's Club, give them the best territories, and put them on stage at kickoff as an example of what great looks like. Then we are surprised when their behaviour spreads. The system often builds the very problem that leaders later have to clean up.

What I've come to believe

1. The end doesn't justify the means. In sales, how you deliver your number matters as much as the number itself, and often more, because the way results are achieved shapes the culture long after the month or quarter closes.

2. Your team judges your leadership by what you tolerate, not what you deliver. They notice what you let slide far more than what you put on a slide.

3. Your team judges your leadership by what you tolerate, not what you deliver. When you let poor behaviour slide because the numbers are good, everyone watching learns that performance buys an exemption from the standards that apply to them.

So I'll leave you with one question. If your top performer walked into an interview tomorrow with the same numbers and the same behaviour, would you hire them again? If you find yourself hesitating, that hesitation is probably your answer.

P.S. This is the kind of decision I help sales leaders work through in my coaching at Growth Getters, where the number and the values point in different directions. If you're sitting on one right now, my DMs are open.