On The Edge Of Toxicity

We have all worked with Sylvie.

You know the one. Brilliant. Exacting. Impossible. The person whose standards are genuinely extraordinary and whose behaviour is everyone else's problem. The one the organisation quietly decided was worth it.

Emily in Paris made it look glamorous. A little brutal, a little chic, ultimately harmless. The reality is less cinematic.

In the industries that trade on creativity and taste, there is a particular tolerance for this personality. The genius gets away with things that would end anyone else's career because the product justifies it. The board looks the other way. The CEO manages around it. HR is told, in various diplomatic ways, that this one is different.

And for a while, the logic holds. The collections are extraordinary. The campaigns land. The numbers are good. The collateral damage is absorbed quietly by the people closest to the fire.

Then one day the genius leaves. Because people like this are loyal to nothing but their own next chapter. They were always going to leave.

And here is what nobody tells you.

The team does not fall apart. It exhales. Then it gets to work.

Decisions that took weeks get made in hours. People who had been operating at half capacity, because the other half was spent managing the genius, suddenly have the full bandwidth. Ideas that had been sitting quietly because there was only ever room for one start surfacing from everywhere.

The numbers do not collapse. In some cases they improve.

The organisation did not lose its creative capability when the genius walked out the door. It had just been sitting on it. Waiting.

The hidden cost was never the departure.

It was the years before it.