DS Cohen & Associates
You have a top producer. The numbers are exceptional and their presence is magnetic. Then a competitor pirates them away, and you sit down for the exit interview. As you listen, the phrases the team used about this person come back to you. Brilliant, but impossible. Great at the job, but it was never about the team. One colleague told you plainly, if they stay, I am going.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The problem was never the output. The problem was what you rewarded, because that output made you look good. You confused confidence with competence, and competence with character. That confusion carries a cost, and it compounds long after the person is gone.
Confidence Performs. Alignment Hides.
We have evolved to read certainty as truth. When someone speaks with assurance, we hear authority. When they tell a compelling story about their success, told with enthusiasm, we hear control and ambition, and we read all of it as competence.
This is why confident people do well in interviews. The best interviewees are often not the most honest. They are the most comfortable with self-presentation. They understand that an interview is a performance, and they know how to perform.
Confidence is visible and visceral. Alignment is neither. You see confidence and make the hire only to discover the misalignment to values and purpose later, usually after the damage is done.
Think about how we assess people. A psychometric assessment is a single photograph. It captures stable traits in one still frame. Behaviour is the film, the full reel of what someone actually does over time and under pressure. Most interviewers fall for the photograph. They admire the polish, the composure, the confident telling of the story. They forget to watch the film. And the film is the only thing that answers the real question. What did this person choose to do when their goals collided with the values of the organization?
Can Do Is Not Will Do
Capability and alignment are different things, and they need different questions.
Can do is ability. You find it by asking about a time someone learned something new or solved a hard problem. Confident candidates shine here. They have the examples ready, and they look smart.
Will do is choice under pressure. You find it by putting values in tension. Tell me about a time your approach conflicted with how the organization wanted things done. What did you do? This is where confidence performs least well, because there is no clever answer. There is only honest reflection about whether you chose alignment or chose to get your way. For this to work, you have to define the behaviours behind your values in advance. If you do not, a confident response will win you over every time.
A misaligned person reshapes the question, or describes tolerating the organization until they could work around it. Listen for that. What someone does in a values conflict tells you more than anything they will ever say about their values.
How Organizations Reward the Wrong People
Every organization has corporate legends. They are the stories a company tells about itself, the moments when its values were tested and the right choice was made, the defining moments that set it apart from every competitor. These stories travel without being sent. They outlast the people who started them. And they teach everyone who arrives what success looks like here and how you earn recognition and reward.
In my book Inside the Box, I describe two kinds of people who shape these legends. There are stars, the people who live the values, especially when it costs them something. Their behaviour becomes the legend others repeat. This is who we are. This is how we win. Then there are the others. They do not live the values, and when their behaviour is tolerated, it does not stay contained. It behaves like a virus in a healthy body. It replicates. It spreads. It infects the people around it, because everyone who watches it succeed learns that the values are optional.
Your top producer is not a star. Whether you intended it or not, a legend is forming around this person, and it is the wrong one. We say we value teamwork, but the reward goes to individual brilliance. We say we value honesty, but we promote results at any cost. People do not learn your values from a poster on the wall. They learn them from who gets the office, the budget, and the applause.
There is a cruel asymmetry here. A misaligned person who does not deliver gets managed out quickly. A misaligned person who delivers gets a bigger office and a bigger budget, and the organization invents a story to protect them. They are a little rough around the edges, but they get results. That story is how the contagion spreads. Permission travels fast.
Culture is not a stack of individual choices. It is an emergent pattern that organizes itself around what gets rewarded. Reward the misalignment and you pull the whole system toward it. Others watch, adjust, and ask why they should hold a standard no one enforces. Once the system settles there, it is hard to move back. You begin hiring and promoting people who fit the pattern, and the infection becomes the culture.
The Cost You Are Not Counting
The obvious cost is the good people who leave. The deeper cost is what happens to everyone who stays.
Psychological safety erodes. People stop speaking up and start working around the problem. The lesson lands quietly. If you are valuable enough, the rules do not apply to you. So everyone begins looking for their own exception. Trust in leadership decays, because people reasonably conclude that the values are decoration, not direction.
What To Do Instead
Name the behaviour, not the person. High performers often do not know they are misaligned. The praise and the rewards keep coming, so they conclude they must be doing it right. They read their success as proof.
This is where the leader needs courage. If no one ever tells this person their behaviour is creating friction, you are not protecting them. You are enabling them, and everyone watching knows it. You become the story. Be specific about the behaviours. Tie the reward not to the outcome, but to the way the outcome is achieved. Until you do that, the person has no reason to change.
You are not asking them to become someone they are not. You are asking one question. Can you work within the values of this organization? If the answer is no, they do not belong here, however good the numbers are.
Some will realign. Some will leave. That clarity is the point. Holding people to a shared understanding of the values has a compounding effect, because it protects and strengthens everyone who is already living them.
If someone cannot operate inside your values, you have a real choice. Protect the culture or keep the performer and pay the cultural price. There is no middle ground, though most organizations pretend there is. You either mean the values, or you do not, and people can always tell the difference.
Confidence is magnetic. Output is measurable. Alignment is quiet, and that is exactly why it is so easy to lose. Protect it, hold it as a standard that does not bend, and your stars become the legends your culture is built on. Neglect it, and something else spreads in their place.
David S. Cohen is the author of “Selecting the Best: Fostering a Workplace Driven by Values for Lasting Success,” amplifies each of the points of this article using a combination of research and anecdotal stories. The appendix contains sample behavioural interview questions. Selecting the Best is available on Amazon and other online book sellers.
