How To Create An Irresistible Culture That Your Toxic People Will Hate

July 12, 2022

What’s impacting your campus performance more than you think?


Your culture.


Specifically, the culture you’re creating as a leader.


If you have been in your leadership seat for three years or more and are not in love with your campus culture… Look in the mirror. 


Leaders create (and allow) culture. 


In weekly table conversations, I hear campus leaders grumble about the growing number of toxic people they have who are negatively impacting their system. 

If you can relate to this reality, let me ask you a question. Is your problem the people or your system? 


Here’s the truth about systems. They are built by teams, and systems drive the overall health of your culture. 


Healthy teams build healthy systems. 


Healthy systems build irresistible culture. 


Create an irresistibly healthy culture, and your toxic people will leave.


Let your culture go flat or get toxic, and your high-capacity and healthy people will depart.


Why? 


Because:

   ➜ A healthy culture spits out toxic people.

   ➜ A toxic culture spits out healthy people.


Here’s the surprise. No one gets kicked out. They just leave when they feel they no longer belong. 


If your value of inclusion includes toxic people, I don’t think your best days are ahead. 


This truth runs more profound than you realize.


A raft of research agrees that people who leave their jobs quit their boss more than they quit their organization.


But remember that underperforming bosses create bad cultures. 


People also quit culture. 


Healthy people quit unhealthy cultures. And unhealthy people quit healthy cultures.


As a result, the overall culture you create as a leader has an awful lot to do with your organization's long-term success or failure.


You either create a campus culture in which healthy people thrive, or you experience the inevitable slide into accidental leadership that brews average teams who fall victim to average performance.


That’s just how human nature works, and great leaders must resist that gravitational pull at all costs. 


I was asked recently by a school leader what I thought the difference is between an unhealthy person and a toxic person. While there are nuances, here’s the bottom line and my response to him: 


Unhealthy people want to grow. Toxic people don’t.


Your organization should always have room for unhealthy people on the road to recovery. You must contain them, care for them, and challenge them to become healthy. 


Toxic people who resist all efforts to help are a whole other thing. And as Henry Cloud argues, you don’t need to keep them around, unless you want them to destroy everything.


So, what do you do about all this?


If you want to create a stellar organizational culture that attracts and keeps healthy people, here are four keys:


1. Focus on Your Personal Health


I have been a senior leader for nearly three decades. As much as I don’t want to admit it, it’s still true: During those 28 years leading within the system, my organization was only as healthy as I was.


Full stop. 


Ditto for you. Fight it all you want, but your organization will only be as healthy as you are as the leader. 


Don’t be offended, but if your system is not healthy… Tag you are it. 


Even if you’re not the senior leader, that’s true of the team you lead, the department you run, or the crew you manage. The health of the leader tends to be the health of the team.

I think of the health of a leader in five categories:


✅ Spiritual

✅ Emotional

✅ Relational

✅ Physical

✅ Financial


While health in each category is nuanced, one thing is true: health in each category means margin.


A healthy leader has a spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical tank that is more full than empty. They have the benefit of not being exhausted all the time, not constantly irritable, or not so over-consumed with the needs of others. 


This is the gift of margin. 


You may wonder what being financially healthy looks like. It’s simple: Living within your means and using the leftovers for the benefit of others. 


I know leaders who make $40,000 a year who have a bit of money in the bank and leaders who make $140,000 who are always strapped and out of money. When your financial situation causes stress, that toxin leaks out all over the place.


Healthy leaders tend to lead healthy organizations because they have the reserves to help others get healthy and have a lower tolerance for toxicity.


Finally, healthy people are attracted to healthy leaders.


That👆🏼might be the solution to your talent recruitment challenge. 


2. Invest in People, Not Just Results


I’m naturally a results person.


But I’ve also come to realize this: Results-driven leaders focus on what they can get FROM their team. Healthy leaders obsess over what they can do FOR their team.


Strangely, if all you think about is what you can get from your team, you always end up with diminishing returns. People feel used and eventually lose heart, start going through the motions, and become underperformers. 


But if you focus on what you can do FOR your team, people lean in and give you much more than you imagined.


The longer I guide and coach others, the more I realize that if you have competent people, the best thing you can do is care about the team as humans.


I’ve observed a few practical strategies that help immensely that you can start today:


➜ Ask team members HOW they’re doing, not just WHAT they’re doing. People want to know that you care.

➜ Invest in your leader’s growth and development.

➜ Do off-sites together. Invest in team retreats, conferences, events, and seminars.

➜ Invest in courses, books, and resources that grow your people and their skill sets.

➜ Invest in personal coaching and consulting support for your leaders and divisional teams.

➜ Give your leaders what they need to do their job well. Everything from slow computers and lousy WiFi to a crappy work environment demotivates people and creates unnecessary barriers. 


Cheap is always more expensive in the long run, right?


Bottom line? Create the kind of environment where the people working for you become better PEOPLE, not just employees. Grow THEM, not just their skills.


When your team grows personally, your progress grows exponentially.


RECLAIM IT!

As we move into the midpoint of summer, you can almost hear that collective “what-the…” from campus leaders across the country. 


“Isn’t July supposed to be when things slow up?”


Most feel that. 


The challenges left in the wake of these past two years have many leaders taking extended leave, and others left to do most of the work. 


The question is, “is it sustainable?”


I know how much this summer break is needed, and I trust that your calendar has some dates marked off for you to truly get away. 


But don’t be fooled. 


I’m here to remind you that many of those same problems and issues will await you and your team when you return in the fall.   


Leaders hate when I say this (while they shake their heads in agreement), but managing crisis was challenging but leading OUT of crisis will be much more complex and demanding. 


Healthy leaders and teams will be in high demand to build (not rebuild) the plans and strategies to navigate the unchartered territory ahead. 


You need to take action and Reclaim Your Momentum!


You may be one of the hundreds who requested and downloaded my free guide on reclaiming your momentum in the past few weeks and months. The feedback I’ve received from so many of you continues to be overwhelming. 


Because of that, I’m going on tour. 


I’ve turned this essential topic into a 2-hour LIVE keynote that I’m delivering to campus leadership teams across the county this summer and fall. 


If you’re like most campus leaders, you’ve spent countless hours these past years putting out fires, dealing with negativity, drama, and just plain old burnout across the board. 


And, like so many others, you’re fed up with feeling stuck. 


It’s time to take action.


For a limited time, I’m offering an Early Bird Discount for campuses that book our new 2-hour live keynote before July 30th! 


Click here for the details.


What are you waiting for?


It would be an honor to be your guide and help you and your team regain lost ground and Reclaim Your Momentum.


Joe


Dr. Joe Hill 

Founder, Higher Performance Group


P.S. Be sure to share this article with a team member or fellow leaders across your network who could use a nudge of inspiration and challenge. Together we can help raise the waterline of hope, stability, trust, and compassion for those doing the most good across our learning communities. 


Click here to learn more.





See What Reclaim Your Momentum {LIVE} is All About

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By HPG Info March 10, 2026
Why Your Cabinet Is Exhausted and Your Results Are Flat LEADER INSIGHTS: Weekly Team Intelligence for Educational Leaders | Dr. Joe Hill | Higher Performance Group A superintendent I know — twenty-one years in education, relentlessly strategic, the kind of leader other leaders call when they're stuck — sat down at a regional convening last fall and said something I haven't stopped thinking about. "I feel like we're sprinting. Everybody's exhausted. Nobody can point to what changed." He wasn't describing failure. His district is moving. His board is happy. His cabinet shows up. He was describing something harder to name: the specific exhaustion of motion without transformation. 73% of educational leaders in our 987-team study report feeling perpetually behind — behind on initiatives, behind on trends, behind on where they think they should be by now. You're not behind. You've been playing the wrong game entirely. The institutions actually winning? They stopped playing catch-up years ago. They're running a fundamentally different game — with fundamentally different rules. And here's the plot twist: the game they're playing is actually simpler than the one you're exhausting yourself with right now. TQ = IQ × EQ × PQ. When your team's collective attention is fragmented across twenty-three initiatives, the PQ dimension — positional intelligence, the clarity about who does what and why — collapses toward zero. Anything multiplied by zero produces exactly the strategic outcomes you've been getting. The Diagnosis: Three Games, One Winner Let's talk about this like adults who've survived multiple strategic planning retreats and at least one initiative that died quietly in a Google Drive folder nobody checks anymore. There's a psychological phenomenon researchers call "temporal comparison bias" that explains why brilliant educational leaders — people who've built entire programs, navigated accreditation, turned around failing departments — feel perpetually three steps behind. Here's how it plays out in real time: Monday, 6:45 AM. You're scrolling LinkedIn before your first meeting. A superintendent three states over just announced a groundbreaking AI initiative. Your immediate thought: We should be doing that. Why aren't we doing that? Tuesday, 2:30 PM. Conference call with peer institutions. Someone mentions their new enrollment strategy showing "promising results." You add "explore enrollment strategy overhaul" to the list of seventeen other things you're currently "exploring." Wednesday, 10:00 AM. Cabinet meeting. Your VP of Academic Affairs wants to discuss three new program launches. Your CFO has concerns about falling behind on facilities. Your Provost is worried about losing ground in faculty development. By Friday, your strategic priorities list has grown from eight items to fourteen. None have moved forward. All are justified by fear of falling further behind. The institutions you think are "ahead" aren't managing more initiatives better. They're managing fewer with singular focus. That superintendent with the AI initiative? She killed four other initiatives to create space for it. You're not behind them. You're just carrying different weight. They're running a 5K. You're running a marathon with a 50-pound backpack and wondering why you can't keep pace. The real problem? You've been optimizing for coverage when you should be optimizing for impact. Coverage thinking: We need to be doing something in every area — enrollment, retention, innovation, facilities, faculty development, student experience, community engagement, technology, equity. Impact thinking: What's the one thing that, if we did it exceptionally well, would make everything else easier or unnecessary? Coverage creates the illusion of progress. Impact creates actual transformation. (This is exactly why The Team Institute exists — not to add more to your plate, but to help your entire leadership cabinet build the collective capacity to decide what belongs on the plate in the first place.) The Framework: The Three Games Call this the Strategic Games Framework. Or don't. It'll still explain why your last strategic plan produced a beautiful document that nobody references six months later. Every educational institution is playing one of three games. Most don't realize they have a choice. The ones winning? They chose deliberately. Game 1: The Comparison Game (Where 70% of leaders live) Success means keeping pace with everyone else. Winning looks like never falling too far behind the pack. Losing looks exactly the same as winning — just with more anxiety. Average strategic priorities per institution playing this game: 12 to 18. Average implementation completion rate: 34%. Leadership energy spent managing initiatives vs. actually transforming: 85% management, 15% transformation. This game is unwinnable. The moment you catch up, the benchmark moves. It's an infinite treadmill where "ahead" doesn't exist — only "less behind." The insidious part? It feels productive. Lots of meetings. Lots of planning. Lots of slide decks. Zero transformation. Game 2: The Innovation Game (Where 20% of disruptors live) Success means being first. Winning looks like conference keynotes and site visits from peer institutions. Losing looks like spectacular failures that become cautionary tales. The Innovation Game is seductive because it feels like leadership — you're not following, you're pioneering. But here's the trap: innovation without implementation infrastructure creates what I call pilot program purgatory — brilliant ideas that launch with fanfare, then quietly fade when the hard work of institutionalization begins. 8 to 12 new initiatives launched per year. 2 to 3 that survive past Year 2. 60% of cabinet capacity consumed managing "innovation." You're pioneering new approaches faster than your institution can absorb change. It's like trying to teach someone to swim by throwing them in the ocean during a storm. Technically teaching swimming. Practically creating trauma. Game 3: The Multiplication Game (Where the 10% who actually win live) Success means multiplying what already works. Winning produces consistent, compound growth that looks boring from the outside but transforms everything from the inside. Your strategy: Subtraction before addition. Multiplication before innovation. Depth before breadth. The institutions winning this game look unimpressive in conference presentations. No flashy AI initiatives (yet). No radical restructuring (yet). Instead: they took the three things they were already decent at and became exceptional at them. Then they built the capacity to add a fourth. That sequencing is everything. It's the TQ formula applied to institutional strategy — not scattered individual initiatives, but collective focus that compounds. IQ × EQ × PQ, multiplied at the team level, aimed at three things instead of twenty-three. The Case Study: Michael's $0 Transformation Let me tell you about a president I'll call Michael. (Not his real name — but Michael, your former Provost absolutely knows this story is about your first two years together, and she's probably nodding vigorously right now.) Michael led a regional public university: 11,000 students, seven colleges, a cabinet of 10 VPs averaging 21 years of experience each. Combined credentials that could staff a small think tank. Combined ability to finish what they started? Roughly equivalent to a book club that's been "reading" the same book for three years. What Michael inherited: 6 major strategic priorities. 23 sub-initiatives. 14 presidential task forces. 8 pilot programs in "evaluation." 147 action items. Zero clear accountability for whether any of it was working. His first six months were consumed by progress reports: "We had three focus groups." "We're gathering stakeholder input." "We're exploring best practices." Activity everywhere. Impact nowhere. Then Michael did something radical. He stopped playing the Comparison Game. He asked his cabinet one question: If we could only do three things exceptionally well over the next two years — three things that would demonstrably transform student outcomes — what would they be? The room went silent. His VP of Student Affairs said what everyone was thinking: "Are you saying we stop doing everything else?" "I'm saying we stop pretending we're doing everything else. Right now, we're doing 23 things at 40% quality. I'm proposing we do 3 things at 95% quality." Months 1–3: Eliminated 20 of 23 initiatives. Dissolved 11 of 14 task forces. Concentrated resources on three priorities: first-year experience transformation, career-connected learning, and faculty excellence in teaching. Months 4–12: Meetings dropped from 3.5 hours to 90 minutes. Decision velocity increased 4x. Implementation completion rate went from 34% to 89%. Year 2 results: First-year retention: +8.7% — largest single-year increase in school history Career placement within 6 months of graduation: +12.3% Faculty teaching excellence scores: +15% across all colleges Cabinet meeting time: cut in half Leadership team: "Finally feels like we're making progress instead of managing chaos" Same people. Same budget. Same external constraints. Same competitive environment. Different game. If you recognize the gap between your cabinet's talent and what you're actually producing together — and you suspect another individual development program won't close it — this is exactly what The TEAM INSTITUTE was built for. Not a workshop. Not a retreat. An 8-month sequential operating system your entire cabinet builds together, from trust to focused execution, applied to your actual strategic challenges. We don't fix people. We multiply systems. More on that below. The Application: Switching Games Here's what to do this week — assuming your calendar isn't already booked with meetings about meetings, in which case, that's actually your first problem: Step 1: The Brutal Subtraction Audit (90 minutes, next cabinet meeting) Put every current "strategic priority" on the board. Not just the official ones — the real ones. Every initiative people are actually working on. Every pilot being "evaluated." Every task force meeting monthly. Ask three questions about each: Does this produce measurable transformation in student outcomes — not stakeholder engagement, not data gathered, actual outcomes? Are we providing 70% or more of what this initiative actually needs to succeed, or are we setting people up to fail while calling it strategic? And does this build future capacity, or will it always require its own dedicated resources? Then force rank everything. Not 'these are all important.' Actual forced ranking. Stop at three. Everything below three? Stop doing it. Not 'deprioritize.' Not 'put on hold.' Stop. (Someone will invoke sunk cost: 'But we've already invested so much in X!' The investment is already gone. The question is whether you keep throwing resources at it. That's not strategy. That's loyalty to a decision that isn't working.) Step 2: The Capacity Calculation (30 minutes, solo) For each of your top three priorities, calculate the actual hours per week required — from the leadership team and from implementation teams — multiplied by 42 working weeks. Add all three together. Do you actually have that capacity, or are you assuming people will "make it work" by eliminating evenings and weekends? If the honest answer is no, you're still in the Addition Game. Reduce scope, eliminate something else, or accept that you're asking people to work unsustainably. Pick one. Step 3: The Multiplication Protocol (Ongoing) For the next 90 days, before adding any new initiative, task force, pilot, or "exploration," your cabinet must answer one question: What are we stopping to create space for this? Not "we'll find time." An actual answer. If you can't name what you're stopping, you can't start the new thing. Track two numbers: addition-to-subtraction ratio (1:1 or better means you're in the Multiplication Game) and implementation completion rate (below 50% means scattered attention producing scattered results; 80%+ means you've actually switched games). On the Objections: "But our board expects us to address all of these areas." Your board expects outcomes, not activity reports. What would happen if you walked in with this: "We focused all our capacity on three priorities. First-year retention is up 8.7%. Career placement is up 12.3%. Faculty excellence scores are up 15%." Boards don't micromanage success. They micromanage stagnation. Produce compound results and they stop asking why you're not doing more. The Maturity Shift On priorities: "We need to be doing more to stay competitive." → "We need to be doing less, exceptionally well, to actually transform." On activity: Confuses meetings completed with momentum. → Measures transformation produced, not initiatives launched. On the competition: Watches what peers are doing and adds to the list. → Watches what's working internally and multiplies it. On capacity: Assumes "we'll find time." Burns people out. Repeats. → Calculates actual capacity. Subtracts before adding. Compounds. You're not behind. You've been playing the wrong game. The Multiplication Game is harder to start — subtracting things you've invested in, having honest conversations about actual capacity, saying no to things that matter — but it's infinitely more sustainable. And the institutions winning it? They look boring from the outside and transformational from the inside. Your Turn: Which game is your cabinet actually playing? Drop one word in the comments: COMPARISON, INNOVATION, or MULTIPLICATION. Then tag a cabinet member who you think would answer differently than you would. That gap in perception? That's the data. Or screenshot the three game descriptions and text them to your leadership team with one question: "Which game are we actually playing right now?" Ready to Stop Playing Catch-Up? Here's what I know after studying 987 leadership teams across 43 states: the cabinet that can't agree on three priorities isn't struggling with strategy. It's struggling with trust. Without trust, subtraction conversations become political. Capacity calculations become weaponized. Forced ranking becomes a turf war. That's why the Multiplication Game isn't something you implement from a newsletter. You need your entire cabinet in the room, building the same foundation, in sequence — not a two-day retreat you'll never quite finish, but a sustained developmental arc that actually rewires how your team thinks together. That's what The TEAM INSTITUTE was built to do. The TEAM INSTITUTE is an 8-month journey that takes your cabinet from individually brilliant to collectively unstoppable — sequentially, through trust, empowerment, collaboration, and focused execution, each month building on the last. You can't skip trust and go straight to strategy. That's not leadership development. That's wishful thinking with a facilitator. The results from teams that complete the full sequence: 3x performance improvement. 29% higher engagement. 27% better organizational outcomes. Zero burnout increase. Not because we fixed anyone — because we changed the system they were operating in. The requirement is simple and non-negotiable: full cabinet participation. Partial engagement produces partial results. You cannot build team-level multiplication with individual-level development. That's the model that got you here. If you're a leader who sees the gap between your cabinet's talent and your collective results — and you're ready to stop treating that gap as a motivation problem — let's talk. Schedule a 30-minute consultation to explore whether The Team Institute is the right fit for your leadership context. This isn't a sales pitch. It's a conversation between people who refuse to accept that "busy" and "effective" mean the same thing. [LEARN MORE] higherperformancegroup.com [SCHEDULE CONSULTATION] Found value in this? Help other educational leaders find it: → Repost with your honest answer — which game is your cabinet actually playing? → Tag a leader who's exhausted from the Addition Game and ready to switch → Comment with the one initiative you know you should stop but haven't — naming it is the first step The more leaders who shift from addition to multiplication, the better our educational systems become. Follow DR. JOE HILL and Higher Performance Group for weekly Team Intelligence insights. Next issue: "Your Cabinet Mistakes Consensus for Alignment (And It's Killing Every Decision)" We'll explore why your leadership team spends three meetings nodding in agreement, then fragments in seventeen different directions the moment they leave the room. Spoiler: You don't have an alignment problem. You have a 'we've never actually defined what alignment means' problem. And the text messages your VPs send each other after cabinet meetings? Those are where your real strategic plan lives. Dr. Joe Hill | Higher Performance Group | The Team Institute higherperformancegroup.com
By HPG Info March 3, 2026
A note before we begin — because this is the first one. Every Saturday, Leader Insights goes out. Sharp. Data-driven. Built to move you toward better team performance, clearer decision-making, and collective capacity that actually multiplies. Saturday speaks to your mind and your will. This is something different. For a long time, I've wanted to write something Saturday doesn't have room for. Something that goes underneath the frameworks and the research and the Monday morning protocols — to the person carrying all of it. The leader who gets the strategy right and still drives home empty. The one who's too professional to say out loud what they're actually feeling at 10 PM on a Sunday. So I built The Source. Same topic as Saturday. Same truth. Carried somewhere Saturday cannot go. Sunday speaks to your soul and your identity. It's not a framework delivery system. It's not a productivity tool. It's a few minutes of restoration before the week begins again — written for the leader who needs to be reminded, regularly and plainly, that they are more loved than their performance suggests and more made for this than their calendar currently reflects. This is the first edition. I'd genuinely love to know if it lands for you. Does this resonate? Drop a comment and tell me — honestly. This is new territory and your feedback shapes where it goes. Before the week finds you again — Before you become the person everyone needs you to be — Can I ask you something? When was the last time you walked out of a building — not to your car, not to your next meeting — but just to feel what was alive in it? Sit with that for a moment. Not as a productivity question. As an invitation. Because somewhere in the answer — if you're willing to follow it — there's something about you that is more true than your title, more permanent than your tenure, and more loved than you've probably allowed yourself to believe on a Tuesday afternoon. Here's what I keep coming back to. The superintendent I mentioned this week — twenty-three years in education, genuinely brilliant — described his work as "managing the temperature in rooms." Temperature management. That's what it had become. Not because he stopped caring. Because somewhere along the way, the system stopped making room for him to do anything else. What if that's not a failure of vision? What if it's something more specific than that? What if the temperature-managing leader isn't someone who stopped caring — but someone who is so deeply wired for creation that being kept from it doesn't just frustrate them? It slowly empties them? What if the feeling he couldn't name on that drive home — the one that arrived even when everything went right — is the sound of a maker being kept from making? That ache has a source. And it is not your job description. Think about the moment you first knew this work was yours. Not the day you got the job. Before that. The moment you looked at something broken — a kid, a school, a system, a community that had stopped believing anyone with your title was worth trusting — and felt something rise in you. Something that said: this doesn't have to stay this way. Where did that come from? You didn't manufacture it. You didn't learn it in a doctoral program or develop it in a leadership workshop. It was there before the credentials and the career. It was there in you the way a river is there in a landscape — not because you built it, but because something larger carved the channel and set the water moving toward everything that needed it most. That impulse is not accidental. It is not psychological. It is not even professional. It is the image of the maker, alive in you, doing exactly what it was placed there to do. And the God who placed it there has not revised the plan. He has not forgotten why. He is, right now, this morning, holding the full vision of what you were made for — and looking at you with the kind of patience that only infinite love and infinite time can sustain — and saying the same thing He has always been saying: I know. I see it. Keep going. I'm not finished with you yet. I want to say something that has nothing to do with your cabinet, your enrollment numbers, or your Maker-Keeper ratio. You are loved. Not when you figure it out. Not when the team finally multiplies. Not when the board stops calling on Friday afternoons. Not when the Neither column gets smaller, or the EQ dimension stops dragging, or the strategic plan finally survives first contact with reality. Right now. Today. In the middle of the incomplete and the imperfect and the still-being-worked-out. You are known completely — every exhausted drive home, every moment you wondered if the machinery was producing anything real, every quiet prayer before a board meeting nobody knew you were scared of — and you are loved anyway. Without revision. Without condition. Without waiting for you to perform your way to worthiness. There is a plan for your life that is older than your leadership challenges and larger than your current capacity to see it. And the one who holds that plan has not once looked at you and thought, "Wrong person." Not once. So go into this week as the person you were made to be. Not the person the role requires — the person the role exists to express. You are not the calendar. You are the calling that existed before the calendar was full. You are not the organizational distance between you and the work. You are the one who was made — specifically, irreplaceably, unrepeatably you — to close it. You are not the temperature manager. You are the maker. And what was placed in you to make has not left you. It is waiting. With extraordinary patience. For you to stop managing long enough to remember. The temperature in the room was never your assignment. The transformation was. And that assignment has not been reassigned. The plan for your life is not in trouble. It is in progress. And you are exactly where you need to be to take the next step. If this landed somewhere strategy doesn't reach — you're not alone. There's a community of leaders doing this work together, not just professionally but personally. Come as you are. higherperformancegroup.com You are more loved than you know. You were made for more than you're currently living. And this week is not in your way — it's in your hands. — DR. JOE HILL & Higher Performance Group | The TEAM INSTITUTE
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