The cultural cost of a bad hire
Table of Contents
Dispensing with all niceties, let’s get straight to the point: hiring the wrong person can be a disaster.
When mediocrity metastasizes #
We’ve all worked with them. The over-promoted middle managers who mistake bureaucracy for leadership. The engineers who turn code reviews into turf wars. The salespeople who confuse aggression with ambition.
These aren’t misunderstood geniuses. They’re cultural rot.
LSA Global spells it out: a single bad hire doesn’t just underperform. They infect.
Teams fracture.
Delivery slows.
Innovation suffocates under passive-aggressive Slack messages.
It’s shit.
But some bad hires don’t just slow things down. They actively wreck the place.
When process is a smokescreen #
The worst kind of bad hire isn’t the one who does nothing, it’s the one who creates chaos to justify their existence.
They don’t enable delivery; they suffocate it under layers of process. They don’t build trust; they undermine teams behind closed doors. They don’t manage; they manipulate.
When somebody rips a key player from a team without notice—then tells them to keep it quiet—it’s not leadership. It’s sabotage.
Top talent doesn’t stick around to fight losing battles #
Top performers won’t waste their time fighting bureaucratic sludge. They’ll find a team where execution matters more than optics.
And this is how companies rot from the inside out. Not in a single implosion, but a slow, steady exodus of the people who actually make things happen.
The fix: cut fast #
- Fire fast, fire first. Keeping a toxic hire signals that this behaviour is acceptable.
- Process should serve delivery, not egos. If it slows things down, kill it.
- Trust is everything. The moment someone starts playing power games, they’re a liability.
Every day you let a bad hire stay, they erode trust and momentum. If you wouldn’t trust them with your company’s future, why are they still here?
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