Brilliance With A Body Count: When Your Star Performer Turns Toxic

Forbes

23-07-2025

Alla Adam, Investor | 3X Founder | Negotiator | Mentor | Pilot | Author at Adam Impact Institute.
Liam and Alice had been thinking about it for too long.
They'd spent years at a Fortune 100—he in compliance, she in strategy—talking about 'someday' building something of their own. Then came the moment. They left their jobs, incorporated a consumer tech startup, raised early capital from a well-known VC fund and started hiring.
And that's when the trouble began.
The Narcissist In Startup Clothing
Jason didn't have formal power, but he had something stronger—exclusive knowledge.
At first, the team admired him. Then they walked on eggshells around him. Finally, they avoided him altogether. Still, his dashboards glowed. His Slack replies were fast and straight to the point. His numbers made you proud.
Liam and Alice weren't naive. They'd worked with mentors, read the books, gone through founder school and sat in board committees for years. But nothing prepared them for the emotional blackmail of brilliance. If you have a group of 30 people together, the room knows where the pockets of quality are. And the problem is when quality becomes a weapon.
Jason dismissed new ideas before they had a chance to fully form. He bulldozed meetings, contradicted colleagues mid-sentence and trained no one. He was a bottleneck disguised as a rocket engine.
Liam once said to me, 'If he left, the whole function would collapse.' That's when I knew they weren't managing a person—they were managing a capability gap.
Why Coaching Doesn't Fix Serial Narcissists
Founders love a good fix. Coach them. Frame the feedback. Mediate the tension.
Except this isn't a growth issue. It's a control issue.
Serial narcissists don't want to evolve—they want to win. So, they weaponize the very tools meant to help them: quoting frameworks back at teammates, performing self-awareness without changing behavior and positioning themselves as misunderstood geniuses.
You know who else can be misunderstood geniuses? Actual geniuses. The difference? Quiet ego. Benjamin Graham—one of the best investors who ever lived—had this trait in spades. 'If you told him a new piece of information,' a colleague once said, 'he'd drop his previous notion without hesitation.'
Serial narcissists have the opposite reflex. They'd burn three bridges before admitting one blind spot. They don't grow from coaching—they just become more cunning.
And by the time you realize it, they've already built a trap that makes them indispensable.
What You're Really Dealing With
You're not stuck because a serial narcissist on your team is brilliant. You're stuck because your company depends on what they know—and only they know it.
This isn't a one-person problem. It's a systems failure. A toxic top performer doesn't make themselves indispensable. You do.
You fail to codify brilliance. You rely on tribal knowledge from the head, not from the whiteboard accessible to everyone. You optimize for speed and pay in culture. You leave your team on their own with a narcissist, all of them in different stages of self-destruction.
And the longer you tolerate it, the more it signals that culture and teamwork are optional.
So, now what?
From Brilliance To Blueprint
There's a strategic move that can be used in this exact spot. I call it Code3. It's fast and human, and it quietly dismantles the narcissist trap.
Here's how it works:
1. Pick the topic. The toxic top performer dominates—say 'enterprise deals' or 'analytics architecture.'
2. Break it into three pillars. This is your teaching scaffold. Three is memorable. Three is enough. It's the Goldilocks zone.
3. Add three examples per pillar. Choose observable, real-life behaviors—no nice-to-haves, only what actually moves the work forward.
4. Draft a rough version. Hand it to your toxic top performer, and tell them it's your attempt at mapping the process.
5. Wait.
If they are truly narcissistic, they'll say, 'This is garbage—I'll show you how it's done.'
Perfect.
Now they're rewriting the system in their own voice, and you're extracting what your company needs to survive them.
Bonus move? Call it a 'masterclass.' Let them teach it. Record it. Turn it into onboarding content. Then let them go—or keep them, now optional.
Code3 can both preserve knowledge and remove leverage. It shifts power from personality to team—and makes sure no one's brilliance holds your company hostage again.
The Real Fear
Liam and Alice (whose names have been changed for confidentiality) once said, 'We can't lose him. There's no one else.'
But that wasn't the truth.
The truth was that they were afraid to prove they could survive without him.
Just like a friend of yours who stayed too long in a toxic relationship. 'He's all I have,' they said. But when it ended, they admit, 'The worst part wasn't losing him. It was realizing how long I believed I couldn't.'
Jason (whose name has been changed for confidentiality) wasn't the function. He was a placeholder for what the company hadn't built yet.
If You're In This Spot
You don't need to fire your toxic top performer today. But you do need to make sure that when they leave—by choice or by demand—they don't take your company with them.
Start by extracting the brilliance. Codify it. Share it. And stop building your business on the backs of people who don't want anyone else to succeed.
Eventually, the moment comes when performance isn't enough to prevent the damage.
Your job isn't to be held hostage by narcissistic top performers. It's to build a business that can outlast even the most brilliant of them.
Confidence creates confidence. If you don't decide what your company needs, the serial narcissist will decide for you. Founders must lead, but they also must own. Own the strategy. Own the systems. Own the exits. And build something that never depends on someone who can't bear to share the win.
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