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The Cost of a C Player: Why Keeping the Wrong Person Costs More Than Replacing Them
I think founders regularly get the cost of a C player backward.
We look at what it will cost to remove someone. Recruiting. Training. Lost time. The discomfort of having the conversation. Maybe even the fear that the replacement will not work out.
Those costs are visible.
So we keep the person.
But while we’re calculating the cost of making a change, the business keeps paying the cost of doing nothing.
And that cost is usually much harder to see.
The salary of someone performing below the required standard is only the beginning. The bigger issue is what that person causes around them.
The Cost of a C Player in Management
Put a C player into a management role and the problem gets multiplied.
A manager tends to manage people at the level they believe is acceptable. If their own standard is mediocre, that becomes the standard around them.
Now we have capable people being managed below what they’re capable of producing.
Some adapt downward.
Some eventually leave.
And the people who are already underperforming tend to stay exactly where they are because the manager often lacks either the confidence or the capability to address the performance problem.
This is where I think owners underestimate the cost of a C player the most.
We think we’re avoiding disruption by keeping the manager in place.
What we’re actually doing is giving that person another 12 to 18 months to build a team in their own image.
Then when we finally decide to fix it, we are not replacing one person anymore. We’re trying to undo the performance standard that has spread through an entire team.
Keeping someone feels less expensive because there is no immediate event attached to it.
No difficult termination conversation today.
No disruption today.
But the cost is still being paid. It is just being spread across months of weaker performance, lower standards, and people adjusting to what leadership is willing to tolerate.
One Underperformer Can Change the Standard for Everyone
The cost of a C player is not limited to management.
I’ve seen the same problem with individual contributors.
Take a sales team with one consistent underperformer.
At first, the high performers compensate.
They work harder. They cover gaps. They carry more of the load because they care about the result and they don’t want the team to miss.
That can make the problem look smaller than it really is because the numbers are still getting produced.
But something else starts happening.
The high performers are watching.
They see that they are producing more while someone else consistently produces less. And they see that nothing happens.
That’s the part owners miss.
We tend to think the issue is one person’s performance. The team is asking a different question:
Does performance actually matter here?
If someone can consistently underperform without consequence, we have answered that question whether we intended to or not.
Eventually some high performers conclude that a business unwilling to differentiate between their contribution and the C player’s contribution is not worth the same level of commitment.
Now the cost of a C player includes the risk of losing the people we were trying hardest to keep.
We saved ourselves from addressing one uncomfortable situation and created a much more expensive one.
The Cost of a C Player Isn’t Just About Performance
This is also why I don’t think we can evaluate talent on performance alone.
A complete assessment has three dimensions:
- Performance: What are they producing today?
- Potential: What could they produce with development and a different level of challenge?
- Values: How do they produce the result, and what behaviors are they teaching the people around them?
That last one gets missed all the time.
A high performer can still be the wrong person.
Someone may consistently deliver the numbers while behaving in ways that undermine the culture we’re trying to create.
Short term, that’s easy to tolerate because the performance is visible.
The damage is not.
Other people watch what gets rewarded. If someone can violate the values of the business as long as the numbers are good, then the values are not really the standard.
Results become the standard.
The behavior starts to normalize.
Over time we end up with a culture where the ends justify the means. That can create brittle commercial relationships and push out people who joined because they believed the stated values actually mattered.
That’s a different version of the cost of a C player, but the pattern is the same.
We focus on what one person produces and underestimate what that person teaches everyone else to tolerate.
Don’t Confuse Current Performance With Future Potential
The reverse mistake happens too.
Sometimes we look at a solid performer and assume that because they are not exceptional today, they are not worth investing in.
But current performance and potential are not the same thing.
Someone may not yet be excelling in their current role while still demonstrating the cognitive capability, learning agility, and character that make them an excellent development investment.
If we only reward current output, we systematically over-invest in what we already have and under-invest in what we could develop.
That matters because talent decisions are rarely just about today’s production.
We are deciding what kind of team we are building.
Who gets developed.
Who gets tolerated.
What behavior gets rewarded.
What Are We Teaching the Team to Tolerate?
The cost of a C player is easy to underestimate because so much of it never appears as a separate line on the P&L.
We see the salary.
We don’t see the capable employee slowly lowering their standard.
We don’t see the high performer becoming resentful.
We don’t see a manager building a mediocre team around themselves until the pattern has been there for a year.
We don’t see culture weakening one tolerated behavior at a time.
Then one day we look around and wonder how the team got here.
Usually it didn’t happen in one dramatic moment.
It happened because we kept making the decision that felt cheaper today.
If we’re trying to build businesses that create real wealth beyond our own effort, we cannot evaluate people only by the cost of replacing them.
We have to evaluate the cost of keeping them.
Because the person we tolerate doesn’t just occupy a seat.
They help define the standard everyone else learns to live with.
Justin D Maxwell provides family office and investment bank services to the lower midmarket to founders who want 8 or 9 figure net worths. You can learn more here: www.justindmaxwell.com or take our free assessment here: https://fielding.global/articles/diagnostic.html