Stop looking at them and look at the team.
If you are asking the question, your gut has probably already answered it. But you cannot fire someone based on a feeling, and you should not want to. You want to make the right decision, especially if this person has been with the company a while or holds a place of leadership. The stakes are real, and getting it wrong cuts both ways.
So the problem is not whether your gut is right. The problem is that you cannot act on gut alone. You need something you can actually measure. Here is a great place to start.
Stop looking at the person you suspect, and look at their team. That is where the truth is. A manipulator is good at managing what you see. They are not good at hiding what they leave behind them, and what they leave behind is a team that tells on them if you know how to read it. This matters even more if you have been feeling confused or second-guessed lately, because these are exactly the people who are good at making you doubt your own read. The team is the thing they cannot spin.
But before you read the team, you have to answer one question, because it changes everything that comes after.
First question: is this a person problem or a culture problem?
Toxicity lives at two levels. It can be a person, a single individual who poisons the people around them. Or it can be the culture itself, a set of things the company quietly rewards that produce toxic behavior in otherwise good people. You read both the same way, by looking at the team. But you treat them completely differently, and confusing the two is how leaders apply the wrong fix for a year and wonder why nothing changes.
Why this matters depends on where you sit.
If you are on the team and not the founder or CEO, the person-or-culture question is how you decide whether to stay or go. If it is one toxic leader and the culture around them is healthy, that is a situation that can change, and you might be able to wait it out or move sideways. If the toxicity is baked into what the whole company rewards, you are not dealing with one bad manager. You are dealing with the water everyone is swimming in, and that almost never changes from where you sit.
If you are on the leadership team, the same question is how you remedy it accurately. Addressing a person and shifting a culture are not the same work. One is a direct, documented conversation about a specific individual. The other is a slow redirection of what the organization praises, promotes, and tolerates. Different approach, different timeline, different outcome. An acute diagnosis is what lets you put the right remedy in place instead of swinging at the wrong target.
So before you act, name the level. Then read the team.
How to read the team
Three things tell you almost everything.
Check the retention rate on their reports. Check the quality of what the team puts out. And check the hours the team burns to hit that output. The patterns do the talking. Low retention is a flag. Low quality is a flag. But here is the sneaky one, the tell most leaders miss. High quality with sky-high hours. Good work, wrecked team. The output still looks fine on the surface, so nobody questions it, while underneath a group of people is being burned to cover for a leader who is inefficient, or manipulative, and pushing the cost down onto everyone below them.
Let me show you both levels in real life, because I have watched each of them up close.
The culture level: an example of reading the signal
Culture toxicity has a hundred faces, and no single one defines it. What matters is learning to read what your company actually rewards, because that is what tells you whether you are looking at a person problem or a place problem. Here is one example of how that read works.
I remember working with a company that would publicly praise people for working through the weekend. The first time I heard it happen in front of the leadership team, I said, why are you praising inefficiency?
Think about what is actually going on in that picture. Nobody wants to work a weekend after already putting in fifty hours during the week. So if someone has to, one of three things is true. Mistakes were made and had to be reworked. The team scoped the project badly and did not plan accurately for what it would take. Or the team agreed to more than it had the capacity to deliver. Every one of those is a problem to solve, not an act to celebrate.
Praising someone for constant overtime is really saying, I see that it takes you seventy hours to do what others do in forty-five or fifty, great job. Which is a strange thing to put on a pedestal.
And then there is the culture signal, which is the part that actually does the damage. When that person gets praised in front of the entire company, it tells everyone watching that the way to earn the CEO's approval is to work eighty hours. It says do not set boundaries. Do not look for efficiencies. Your indicator of success is being a workaholic. Every piece of that is something the data has shown does not add value to a company, and in plenty of cases quietly subtracts it. That is a culture problem. No single person is the villain. The reward system is. And notice what the read required: not a list of toxic traits, but one honest look at what the company stood up and applauded. That is how you tell a place problem from a person problem. You watch what gets rewarded.
The person level: the leader who bleeds talent
The other version is one individual, and the clearest tell there is retention of your best people.
I have watched high performers leave a company because of one toxic leader. The thing is, they gave signals first. They almost always do. The signals were there and were not listened to, and eventually the best people did the math and left. Their exit was the data point that had been available for months, just ignored.
Toxic individuals are good at hiding their flaws, and they tend to hide them the same way. They constantly question the people around them. They blame the system for everything. And the sneaky one, they add complexity to the system on purpose, so that when something goes wrong they can point at the complexity as the excuse. They build a fog and then hide in it. If a leader's part of the org keeps getting more tangled and harder to understand, and only they can explain it, pay attention to that.
Ground it in your values
Once you have read the team and named the level, you need something concrete to hold the person or the pattern against, not just a stronger vibe. This is where your company values do real work, if you have built a culture with clear ones.
I love the rating system from Gino Wickman's Traction. GWC plus core values. Do they Get it, do they Want it, and do they have the Capacity to do it. Then, separately, do they actually live your values. The values check is the one that matters most here. Someone can crush the numbers and still be completely wrong for the company, and Wickman's framework is blunt about it. If a person does not share the values, they go near the top of the list to coach up or coach out, no matter how good the output looks. A manipulative high performer is exactly the person that filter was built to catch.
Turn the feeling into a paper trail
Now you put it together. The values misfit. The team metrics, retention and quality and hours. The character pattern, the constant blame, the perpetual quarrel with someone, the little coalition of people they pull aside to complain to and pull into their version of events. Manipulators almost always build that coalition.
Stacked up, the gut feeling becomes documentation. You are no longer acting on a feeling. You have a clear, written justification, and you can move with a clean conscience.
One more thing, because it is the most common mistake I see. Most companies hold on to these people way too long. Pull your emotion out of it, get an accurate diagnosis, document, and make the change. The energy it takes to manage a toxic person, redirected toward building with people who are all the way in, might be the next real breakthrough in your business.
If you are a team member trying to decide whether to stay, run the person-or-culture question honestly. A single bad leader inside a healthy culture is a different bet than a culture that rewards the wrong things from the top. One can change. The other rarely does, and knowing which one you are in is worth more than any pep talk about toughing it out.
If you are on a leadership team, the same diagnosis is your remedy. Name whether you are addressing a person or shifting a culture, because the two ask completely different things of you, and the accurate read is what makes the change actually stick.
If you are the founder or CEO
As you position your company for growth, having the right person in the right seat is everything. Jim Collins published that idea in Good to Great more than two decades ago, and it is still the area I watch founders and CEOs struggle with most. The framework is old. The discipline is rare.
Once you move past the phase where you are micromanaging, or at least touching every function of the business yourself, having the right person in the right seat stops being a nice-to-have. It becomes the thing that determines whether you grow or stall. And the ability to look honestly at your culture, including at yourself, and name toxic traits at both the person level and the culture level, is a skill. It is one of the skills that decides which way it goes.
Think about how much energy gets devoted to managing toxic employees. How much churn comes out of toxic cultures. All of it is a back current pulling against the goals you set. If you push the team for twenty or thirty percent growth because you hit it last year, but you will not address a toxic person on your leadership team, you are confusing the entire organization. You are asking for two things that contradict each other and wondering why neither fully lands.
Toxicity is not always a fireable offense, and naming it does not always end with someone gone. But it is something leadership has to stay highly sensitive to, and protect the company against at all cost. The read is the job. Make it accurately, and the remedy follows.
So much respect.
Frequently asked questions
Q: How can a leader tell the difference between a high performer and a manipulator? A: Stop watching the person and look at their team. A manipulator manages what you see but cannot hide what they leave behind. Check retention on their reports, the quality of the team's output, and the hours the team burns to hit it. Low retention or low quality is a flag, and so is high quality with sky-high hours, which means the team is being burned to cover for the leader.
Q: Is my workplace toxic, or is it just my manager? A: That is the most important question to answer first. Toxicity shows up at two levels, an individual or the culture itself. If it is one bad leader inside an otherwise healthy culture, the situation can change. If the toxicity is baked into what the whole company rewards, you are dealing with the water everyone swims in, which rarely changes. Naming the level tells you whether to stay, move, or go.
Q: What are the signs of a manipulative employee or leader? A: They constantly question the people around them, they blame the system for everything, and they often add complexity on purpose so they can hide behind it when things go wrong. They tend to build a small coalition of people they pull into their version of events. The clearest organizational tell is that good people on their team give signals and then leave.
Q: How do I document a toxic high performer before acting? A: Stack three things. The values misfit, measured against clear company values such as the GWC and core-values check from Gino Wickman's Traction. The team metrics, meaning retention, quality, and hours to output. And the character pattern, the blame, the perpetual conflict, the coalition. Together they turn a gut feeling into written justification you can act on with a clean conscience.