For years, I believed that the highest-performing employee producing the best individual results was always the most valuable person in the room. Leadership has a way of challenging your assumptions, and as teams became cross-functional and collaboration became more important than individual brilliance, I realized that this can become the biggest obstacle to collective progress.

For the same reason, I had to let go of a high performer who was exceptional. When a project was assigned to him on Monday, it was completed perfectly by Wednesday. There were no missed details, no need for follow-up meetings or constant supervision. If performance were measured purely by output, he would have been among the strongest employees I had ever worked with. But leadership teaches you that output is only one part of the story. The real test begins when individual talent meets team dynamics. And that's where the problems started.

The Behaviours That Slow Teams Down

When I put him inside a team, things started to slow down. Collaboration moved a step back. He genuinely cared about quality, but the problem was that their identity was deeply connected to being the person who delivered the best work.

The challenge with almost every high performer is that their weaknesses hide behind their strengths.

They Struggle to Delegate:

Delegation requires trust. You have to believe that someone else can complete a task differently without necessarily completing it poorly. Whenever work was assigned to others, they felt compelled to monitor every detail. Instead of collaborating with teammates, they took tasks back into their own hands. Then the projects become dependent on one person and only fewer people feel ownership of the work. Here, one person's competence became everyone else's dependency. This is not delegation but micromanagement disguised as excellence.

They Fix Mistakes Leaving No Context Behind:

Spotting problems is important, but what comes next determines whether the organization improves. When a high performer steps in to fix problems without explaining what went wrong, the project will move forward without having the person who made the mistake never learn why it happened. So, the chances of the same mistakes happening are high.

They Do Not Prioritize Team’s Velocity:

Quality matters especially in industries where mistakes carry real consequences. Throughout my years in health tech, precision has never been optional. Every project has a required standard. Some tasks demand extraordinary precision while others just need to be completed reliably and on time. For high performers, they mostly work according to their own quality standards, which sometimes were higher than what the project required. While that sounds admirable, it created delays. Tasks that should have taken hours with the help of team consumed days.

The Difference Between Contributors and Multipliers

One of the biggest shifts in my leadership journey was understanding the difference between a contributor and a multiplier. A contributor creates value through their own work. They solve problems and consistently produce high-quality output. A multiplier creates value differently. They make everyone around them better transferring knowledge, improving systems and building confidence within the team. Their success is not measured only by what they accomplish individually, but by how much stronger the entire team becomes because they are part of it.

Both roles are valuable. But as organizations grow, the value of multipliers begins to move up than individual contribution. For example, a contributor may complete ten important tasks in a week while a multiplier helps ten people each complete ten important tasks. The result is not just more work getting done but building a team that is capable, independent and confident over time.

By building Elixr Labs, the health tech company, my idea of collaboration has extended beyond performance metric. If an employee consistently damages teamwork, slows knowledge sharing, or prevents others from growing, that affects business performance directly. Without collaboration, organizations become dependent on individuals and it creates risk because of what happens when the expert leaves. If critical knowledge exists in one person's head, the organization becomes vulnerable.

Great teams distribute knowledge instead of concentrating it and build systems, mentorship and collaborative cultures.

The Decision to Let Them Go

The gap between individual performance and team impact became impossible to ignore. It was not a decision made after one incident or one difficult project. It was the result of observing the same patterns repeated. The more I looked beyond the quality of the work and focused on its long-term impact on the team, the clearer the decision became.

Organizations need talented people and experts. It also needs high performing teams built on trust, collaboration and communication. That is the kind of excellence that scales.

Do you agree that team impact should matter as much as individual performance when evaluating great employees?