The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving. My hand is frozen over the mouse, the smooth plastic suddenly feeling alien and heavy. I’m staring at a three-sentence email that has taken me forty-seven minutes to rewrite. A simple client update. Something I delegated an hour ago to a person I hired specifically to handle things like simple client updates. Yet here I am, deep in the grammatical weeds, debating the merits of ‘we’ve discovered an issue’ versus ‘an issue has arisen.’ The first feels accountable, the second passive. Does it matter? Yes, it matters. It all matters. A slow, hot wave of something between pity and rage washes over me. Is this my fault? Am I just a terrible delegator? The thought is a familiar, bitter pill.

This is the moment nobody talks about when they celebrate a new hire. Not the signed offer letter, not the welcome lunch. This is the moment, weeks or months later, when the relief of having ‘a body in the seat’ curdles into the exhausting reality of having the wrong body in the wrong seat. We call them ‘good enough’ hires. They aren’t disastrous. They don’t set fire to the server room. They show up, they complete tasks, they are pleasant. But their work product consistently, maddeningly, requires a final 17% of effort from someone else. Someone like you. And that 17% is the most expensive tax in your entire business.

I believe you must have zero tolerance for this kind of mediocrity. You have to be ruthless in protecting the standard of excellence. It’s the only way to build something that lasts.

Victor’s Dilemma: The Erosion of Trust

Let me tell you about Victor C.M. He was a seed analyst we hired a few years back at a small agricultural venture. On paper, he was perfect. Great credentials, quiet confidence, a passion for heirloom varietals. His job was to manage the data for our germination trials. We had 77 distinct lots of seeds, and his primary role was to track their progress and flag anomalies. For the first few months, it seemed fine. Reports were filed. Spreadsheets were updated. But then the growers started calling. Lot 237-B, a prized Brandywine tomato, was showing a germination failure rate of 47%, yet Victor’s report had it marked as ‘within tolerance.’ A different grower noted that the data for a cucumber strain was identical to the data for a winter squash from the previous month. Copy-paste errors. Small things.

Individually, each mistake was minor. A quick fix, a gentle correction. But they never stopped. It was a slow, constant drip of errors. The A-players on the team, the meticulous botanists and data scientists, they noticed first. They stopped trusting Victor’s data. They started running their own parallel spreadsheets, ‘just to be safe.’ Their own high-impact work-developing more resilient hybrids-slowed to a crawl because they were spending a quarter of their day double-checking the work of the ‘good enough’ guy. They never complained to me. They were professionals. Instead, I saw it in the late-night timestamps on their own project files. I saw it in the way they’d just nod, tight-lipped, when Victor presented his findings in meetings.

The Brandywine Metaphor: Thin Skin, High Cost

Speaking of Brandywine tomatoes, they have this incredibly thin skin. It’s what makes them so luscious and flavorful, but it’s also what makes them a nightmare to ship commercially. They bruise if you look at them the wrong way. The very quality that makes them desirable is also their systemic weakness. And that’s the problem with the Victors of the world. Their work has thin skin. It looks fine on the surface, but under the slightest pressure of real-world application, it falls apart, creating a mess for everyone else to clean up.

I kept Victor on for another 7 months. I’d seen his kid’s photo on his desk. I knew he had a long commute. I told myself he was just learning, that he’d get there. I told myself I was being a compassionate leader. What a lie. I wasn’t being compassionate; I was being a coward. I was avoiding a difficult conversation because it made me uncomfortable. The cost of my cowardice was the slow erosion of my best people’s morale. The real damage wasn’t in the bad data; it was in the message my inaction sent to the rest of the team: excellence is optional here. It’s a lonely position, realizing you’re the bottleneck because you can’t build the right team. It’s a systemic problem, not just a hiring problem, and fixing systems is where many leaders find they need a different perspective. It’s often where they turn to resources like an Executive Coaching Georgia to rewire their own approach before they can rewire the company.

The Universal Acid: Eroding Standards

This isn’t just about work. This principle of tolerating mediocrity for short-term relief is a universal acid. It corrodes teams, yes, but it also corrodes products, relationships, and personal standards. You accept a buggy feature because you need to hit a launch date. You stay in a ‘good enough’ relationship because it’s easier than being alone. You eat the junk food because you’re too tired to cook. In each case, you are trading a future of strength and quality for a present of ease and comfort.

The slow departure of your stars is the real price.

Your top performers are not paid to be editors. They are not paid to be tutors. They are paid to create, to innovate, to push the boundaries. When they find themselves spending 27% of their time correcting, cajoling, and compensating for a mediocre colleague, they don’t file a complaint with HR. They don’t demand a raise to cover their new, unofficial duties. They just leave. They update their LinkedIn profiles quietly on a Tuesday night. They take a call from a recruiter during their lunch break. They accept another offer for $7,777 less than you would have paid to keep them, because it isn’t about the money. It’s about the environment. It’s about being surrounded by people who elevate them, not anchor them. And one day, you look up from rewriting another three-sentence email and realize your best botanist, your most brilliant data scientist, is gone. And you’re left with Victor.

The Realization: My Error, My Cost

We eventually had that difficult conversation. It was awkward and painful, but necessary. I heard later that Victor started a small, subscription-based newsletter for local gardening enthusiasts. It was probably fine. Good enough, even. He wasn’t a bad person; he was just a bad fit, a round peg I had stubbornly tried to hammer into a square hole for months. It felt like that time I spent a full minute pushing on a heavy glass door at a cafe, feeling my shoulder strain, getting increasingly frustrated, only to realize the elegant script on the handle clearly said ‘Pull.’ The error wasn’t in the door. The error was mine. The real cost wasn’t in the reports Victor filed, but in the talent that walked out the door while we were busy correcting them.