Why Your Top Performers Are Slowing the Rest of the Team Down
Your top performers are often your biggest constraint. They are overcompensating for underperformers.
The pattern is brutal and common: a strong performer covers for a weak one, the weak performer never improves, the strong performer burns out, and team performance collapses.
Working with 3,000+ leaders taught me one thing clearly: enabling underperformance destroys high performance faster than market conditions, resource constraints or competitive pressure. Your strongest people should not be working harder to make up for your weakest people working less.
A Real Example of the Pattern in Action
Last month, a manufacturing client had this exact dynamic. Their best site manager was covering three underperforming locations, working seventy-hour weeks, preventing total failure and also preventing necessary change. His competence was masking their incompetence, and his high performance was subsidising their low performance.
How We Stopped the Enabling
- Set clear performance standards, the same for everyone.
- Ran weekly performance reviews using data rather than opinions.
- Put 90-day improvement plans in place with real consequences.
- Built alternative support systems so that help meant coaching and building capability, not covering and rescue.
Two underperformers improved dramatically. One chose to leave. The star reduced his hours by 35 per cent and delivered better results.
Are you the bottleneck?
Take the two-minute assessment and see exactly where work is queueing around you, and what to hand over first.
The Standard You Set Is the Culture You Get
High standards benefit high performers and low standards punish them. Your best people are watching how you handle your worst people, and that is how they decide whether to stay or leave.
What to Do Now
- Look for the places where excellence is propping up mediocrity.
- Name the gap.
- Make the standard explicit.
- Give real support, not rescue.
- Set a clear timeline for improvement with visible checkpoints, then hold the line.
What underperformance are your strong performers covering for, and what is it costing your team.
If you want help to diagnose this fast and reset your performance system without burning out your stars, this is the work we do in the Amplify Leadership programme at JBL High Performance.
If this sounds like your week
Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.
When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.
- Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
- Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
- How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
- Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
- The High Performance Leader podcast.
Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.
Start this week
Busy all day and still behind?
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Get the Quick-Win PackQuestions managers ask about this
How do top performers slow down overall team performance?
Top performers often cover for underperforming colleagues, working longer hours to prevent failure. This masks weak performance, prevents necessary change, and leads to burnout among your best people, ultimately causing a decline in team results.
What steps stop top performers from covering underperformance?
Set clear, consistent performance standards for everyone and hold weekly reviews based on data. Introduce 90-day improvement plans with real consequences, and provide coaching that builds capability rather than rescue. This approach stops enabling underperformance and supports sustainable team improvement.
Why is setting the same performance standard important?
High standards benefit your strongest people and discourage low performance. When top performers see weaker colleagues excused, they may feel undervalued and consider leaving. Consistent standards create a culture where everyone is accountable and motivated to improve.
How can I identify if my managers are bottlenecks?
Look for stalled decisions and areas where work is piling up. Assess how managers spend their time and whether their bosses notice improvement. Use simple diagnostics to pinpoint where friction occurs and focus on those areas to clear blockages and improve flow.
Explore this topic
Hear this discussed on the podcast
Episodes of The High Performance Leader that cover the same ground.
Jimmy Burroughes
FounderFormer British Army officer and corporate GM who has transformed nearly 3,500 managers into leaders across 30+ organisations. Creator of the Simplify to Amplify methodology, author of Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance, and two-time Global Recognition Award winner.
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Want to know where the drag really is?
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