Sometimes the best employee is the one you rebuild

A while back I wrote about walking away from a client who was tearing my team apart. That piece hit a nerve—mostly with owners who’d lived through the same thing and never had the words for it. But more than one reader asked the harder question afterward: what do you do when the problem isn’t the client, but someone on your own payroll?

That’s the conversation I actually dread more.

The part I kept putting off

Most MSPs run on a mix of techs who are hungry and still learning, and veterans who’ve seen it all—both matter. But somewhere along the way, some of those veterans start treating tenure like a license. They resist every new process,  roll their eyes at younger teammates and tell you, in a dozen small ways, that “that’s not how we’ve always done it.”

And because they’ve been here forever, because they know the clients, because the conversation itself feels exhausting—we let it slide. I let it slide, longer than I should have, with people I genuinely liked.

Here’s what I eventually had to accept: culture doesn’t care how long someone’s been here. It responds to behavior. Full stop.

We didn’t leave it to chance

We stopped hoping it would fix itself and built something on purpose. Every Thursday for eight weeks, my whole team sat down together for what we called Culture Training: about an hour, one topic, one hands-on activity and a commitment card everybody signed at the end. Not a poster in the break room, but a weekly habit.

We built it around five values: honor, respect, commitment, integrity and relentless. Instead of aspirational statements, we focused on non-negotiable standards of behavior. Week one, we drew the line between intentional culture and accidental culture_—companies that define their culture on purpose and live it out deliberately, versus companies that let culture define itself through unchecked habits. We told the team straight that we were choosing to be intentional, starting that day.

Week five, I taught it myself: “Culture is built by all of us.” We talked about the real cost of one negative voice in a small, tight-knit team, specifically how one person choosing negativity can poison up to twenty percent of a day’s culture and drag the whole team backward with it. We talked about the difference between supporting a teammate and enabling one. Supporting is holding the standard and holding someone’s hand at the same time, while enabling is staying quiet to keep the peace. We closed that session with a commitment card: “I commit to being a builder of our culture, not a drain on it.” Half the room had never been asked to sign something like that in their life.

The votes you cast every day

One idea from that course has stuck with me more than any other: culture isn’t built at the annual retreat or the all-hands meeting. It’s built in the smallest moments that seem insignificant until they add up to something undeniable: how you handle the phone call at five o’clock when you’re already exhausted, how you answer the fifteenth question from a customer whose patience ran out an hour ago or whether you document the ticket properly when you’re two minutes from the door. Every one of those is a vote, and you cast hundreds of them a day. What does your ballot say?

Not every problem employee is a lost cause

That question changes how you handle people, too. Letting someone go should never be the first move; it should be close to the last one.

We had a tech who’d become the person newer hires quietly avoided. He was short with people, dismissive in meetings and had the kind of attitude that makes a Level 1 tech think twice before asking a question. I had the conversation nobody wanted to have. Not a write-up—a real one, using the same framework we now teach every Thursday: describe the situation, describe the behavior, describe the impact, then let them respond. I told him exactly what I was seeing and what needed to change, and I told him I thought he was worth the effort, otherwise I wouldn’t have been sitting across from him. He didn’t turn around overnight, but months later, he was mentoring the same techs he used to talk over.

Some people won’t change

Then there’s the other kind. We had someone in a leadership role I had that same direct conversation with—more than once. Clear expectations, clear examples, clear consequences. Nothing changed.

Eventually I asked myself the same question I ask about a bad client: would my team be relieved if this person weren’t here anymore? The answer was yes, and it wasn’t close. Waiting any longer wasn’t loyalty, it was avoidance dressed up as patience.

What keeps it alive

A one-time class doesn’t build a culture, it just starts one. What keeps it alive is what happens between the sessions.

We start every morning with a fifteen-to-twenty-minute stand-up: what’s going on, what we need help with, what’s stuck and where we need to lean on each other to keep building the culture we committed to. We close every day with a quick Teams message: what tasks we’re stuck on and whether we need help. Small, boring, repeatable—that’s the point. Culture dies when we stop doing the small things because no one’s watching. It stays alive when checking in on each other stops being a program and just becomes how we work.

Where we’ve landed

My grandfather used to say a man is only as good as his word. I’ve come to believe culture works the same way—it’s only as good as what you actually do about it, on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody’s keeping score.

Eight weeks of learning only means something if it turns into eight months of practice, and eventually eight years of culture. Rebuilding ours wasn’t one meeting. It was a hundred uncomfortable conversations we finally decided to have—some of which saved good people, and a few of which ended relationships that needed to end.

Both were the job. Neither one was optional.

Related: 4 Truths About Risky Employee Behavior.