Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Allan Lopes — founder and CEO of the Healthy Building Certificate — as one of the clearest voices on a problem most CEOs avoid until it destroys them: the high-performing employee who violates company values. Lopes built a global healthy building certification company from a 2012 academic congress by learning one brutal lesson about scaling — your physical environment and your people environment follow the same rule. When either one makes people sick, performance collapses. When a CEO tolerates a values-violating top performer, every employee in the company watches and adjusts their behavior accordingly.
This episode is for CEOs scaling a company who suspect a toxic culture or a misaligned high performer is limiting their growth ceiling.
Key Takeaways
- CEOs who keep values-misaligned employees — even high-revenue producers — signal to the entire organization that values are optional, destroying culture faster than any external threat.
- When Allan Lopes shifted his education strategy from architects and engineers to CEOs and end users, client conversion accelerated — because 70–75% of his technical leads came from end users who had already heard him first.
- AI eliminates mediocrity by replacing the middle tier of any profession — the “adequate but not excellent” performer — forcing every professional to either excel or drop out of competition.
- A CEO rarely hears from their team that someone is toxic because employees assume the CEO is friends with the problem person and hold back — which means CEOs must act on their own read, not wait for feedback.
- The payroll math on healthy environments: a $100,000 investment in a healthy building for a company with a $10 million payroll is 1% of the budget protecting 100% of the most valuable asset.
Why Your Toxic High Performer Is Your Biggest Scaling Threat
The hardest firing decision a CEO makes is not the poor performer. It is the high performer who violates company values.
Jack Welch built a two-axis matrix to clarify this decision: values alignment on one axis, numbers delivery on the other. The easy quadrants are the ones most CEOs focus on — fire the low performer who also violates values, keep the high performer who lives the values. The hard quadrant is the one that destroys companies: the high performer who delivers numbers but does not align with values.
“The toughest thing is to fire people that don’t belong to your company,” Lopes said. “The people who give you a number but do not align with the values of the company — those people you need to fire, plain and simple.”
Glenn Gow sees this scenario constantly. The head of sales hits quota every quarter. But the marketing team refuses to collaborate with them. Customer success dreads handoffs. The product team stops sharing what they hear from prospects. The CEO knows something is off but holds back — because the board measures revenue, and this person delivers it.
The calculation feels rational in the short term. It destroys companies over the medium term.
Here is why. Every employee in the company is watching the CEO. When a CEO tolerates a values violator because they produce, the company interprets that as permission. The implicit message: results override culture. Employees who want to stay adjust. Employees who care about culture leave. The ones who remain are now operating in an environment where the stated values are decoration.
Lopes adds a dimension most CEOs miss: “It’s not only bad for you or your company, it’s bad for that person too — because there might be a place where that person fits, and they are wasting their time, their purpose in life, where they could be in another place where their talent could blend with whatever that other company’s culture is.”
The decision to act is not a punishment. It is clarity — for the company and for the person.
Why CEOs Never Hear About the Problem Until It’s Too Late
There is a structural reason CEOs are the last to learn their high performer is toxic: no one tells them.
Lopes is explicit on this point. Even in his own company, where he actively works to be approachable and eliminate hierarchy barriers, employees hold back. “Nobody’s gonna tell you as a CEO,” he said. “People just have a barrier to talk to people who are higher in the hierarchy. I try not to have that kind of culture in my company, but it’s just natural to people — they’re like, ‘I don’t know how good friends Allan is with that person, so I just hold back.'”
This means the CEO who waits for team feedback before acting on a values-violating high performer will wait too long. By the time someone speaks up, the damage is done.
Lopes’s diagnostic for breaking this pattern is simple, though not easy: stop asking and start observing. Watch who avoids whom. Track which cross-functional projects stall. Notice who is in the room when you are and who disappears when that person walks in. Lopes acts on what he sees across those collaboration patterns — not on what direct reports choose to bring to him.
Then act on what you see — not on what you hear.
How CEOs Identify the Right Buyer in a New Product Category
Lopes built the Healthy Building Certificate over 10 years. The first seven were slower than they needed to be. The reason: he was educating the wrong people.
From 2006 through roughly 2019, Lopes and his team focused their education effort on engineers, architects, and general contractors — the technical professionals who build and certify buildings. The logic was sound. These were the people who implemented healthy building science. If they understood it, the market would move.
The data said otherwise. When Lopes analyzed where his technical leads actually came from, 70–75% of engineers and architects who engaged with the Healthy Building Certificate did so because their client — a CEO, a company founder, a parent concerned about their family — had heard Lopes speak and demanded the certification. The technical buyer was responding to a demand signal from the end user, not generating it.
“If I went back 10 years ago, I’ll be talking more to CEOs than to architects,” Lopes said. “I’ll be talking more with household owners — with the husband and the wife — more than their architects.”
Lopes points to Natura, the largest Brazilian cosmetics company and parent of Avon and The Body Shop, as the defining example. Natura became one of his major clients — but the relationship did not start with a facilities team or a sustainability officer. It started with the founder, who heard Lopes speak and said: “I love that. Makes so much sense. I want that in Natura because I want my people to perform their best.” The technical implementation followed from a CEO directive.
By 2017, that founder-driven commitment produced a state-of-the-art facility in Brazil housing 8,000 people — glass roof for natural light throughout, gardens, and living plants integrated into the workspace.
The market education lesson for any CEO scaling a new category: identify who makes the demand decision, not just who executes the delivery. The person who writes the check and says “I want this” generates more pipeline than the person who would implement it.
How AI Will Force Every CEO to Raise the Talent Bar
Lopes draws a sharp line between the industrial revolution and AI, and the distinction matters for CEOs planning their next hire.
The industrial revolution replaced physical labor. Washing machines freed hours previously spent on manual tasks. AI, in Lopes’s framework, replaces cognitive mediocrity — the acceptable-but-not-excellent professional who survives because clients need someone and they are better than nothing.
“Before AI, a mediocre professional would go by because we needed them,” Lopes said. “A regular, OK accountant — you needed that guy because he knew more than you but he wasn’t excellent. He was right there in the middle and he allowed himself to think: it’s good for me, it’s OK, I don’t need to push myself.”
In Lopes’s view, AI eliminates that middle tier. The adequate accountant, the passable engineer, the functional project manager who never goes beyond the baseline — AI handles their work faster, more accurately, and without salary expectations.
“Either you will excel and become more human — we’re gonna become superhumans — or if you wanna be in the middle, there won’t be any space for you in the middle, because the middle will be taken by AI,” Lopes said.
What remains in Lopes’s framework is two categories: those who excel, and those who drop to the lowest tier — with the dividing line determined by whether a professional adopts AI before it becomes standard in their industry.
In Lopes’s own company, AI is already operational. Meeting notes are recorded and processed through ChatGPT — eliminating manual write-ups and freeing the team for the human work. Building material analysis, previously one of the most time-consuming parts of their certification process — evaluating every paint, every adhesive, every material used in construction — now runs through AI before a human reviews the output.
The implication for CEOs: if you tolerate mediocre middle performers now, AI will not solve that problem for you. AI replaces the commodity version of that work — not the leadership, judgment, or human connection required to use AI well. CEOs who upgrade their talent bar before AI becomes standard in their industry will have compounding advantage. Those who wait will find themselves managing people who are now competing directly with software.
Principles CEOs Apply to Scale Through People and Culture
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Values-aligned firing is non-negotiable | When a high performer violates company values, the cost of keeping them is not the revenue risk — it is the cultural damage to every employee watching | At the Healthy Building Certificate, Lopes built a global certification company from a single 2012 academic congress; he credits operating by this principle — removing people whose numbers were strong but whose values were not — as a structural condition of scaling a culture-dependent business across multiple countries |
| Educate the demand creator, not the implementer | In a new category, the fastest path to technical adoption is the CEO or end user who commands implementation — not the professional who executes it | 70–75% of Healthy Building Certificate technical leads came from end users who had already decided they wanted the certification; Natura’s 8,000-person healthy building in Brazil was built because the founder directed it after hearing Lopes speak |
| Act before the team tells you | CEOs are structurally the last to know about a toxic employee because employees assume proximity between the CEO and the problem person — requiring the CEO to observe collaboration patterns and act on what they see rather than wait for feedback | At the Healthy Building Certificate, Lopes observes this pattern suppresses signal even in his deliberately flat culture — leading him to act on who avoids whom and which cross-functional projects stall, rather than waiting for a direct report to name the problem |
| Use AI to reclaim human time, not to replace human judgment | AI eliminates the drudgery that crowds out creative and relational work — what Lopes calls the time “to be more human” | At the Healthy Building Certificate, routing building material analysis through AI before human review eliminated the single most time-consuming step in certification, compressing the evaluation timeline across all 2025 certifications and freeing the technical team for client-facing work that AI cannot do |
Quotes from This Episode
- “The toughest thing is to fire people that don’t belong to your company.” — Allan Lopes, Founder and CEO, Healthy Building Certificate
- “If I went back 10 years ago, I’ll be talking more to CEOs than to architects. I’ll be talking more with household owners — with the husband and the wife — more than their architects.” — Allan Lopes, Founder and CEO, Healthy Building Certificate
- “AI is going to help us be more human, because we’re gonna have time to spend with the other humans.” — Allan Lopes, Founder and CEO, Healthy Building Certificate
Frequently Asked Questions
How do CEOs identify when a high performer needs to be fired for values misalignment?
Allan Lopes, founder and CEO of the Healthy Building Certificate, applies the Jack Welch values-versus-numbers matrix: the only quadrant that requires a firing decision even when it is painful is the high performer who does not align with company values. The defining signal is strong performance numbers alongside cross-functional friction — marketing avoids collaboration, customer success dreads handoffs, product stops sharing intelligence — and because hierarchy suppresses direct feedback even in deliberately flat cultures, the CEO must observe those collaboration patterns and act on what they see, not what they hear.
How should a CEO market a new product category when buyers do not know they need it yet?
CEOs scaling a new category should educate the demand creator — the person who decides to want the product — rather than the technical implementer who would use it. Allan Lopes spent seven years selling healthy building science to engineers and architects before data showed him that 70–75% of his technical leads came from CEOs and end users who had already heard him speak and demanded the certification from their technical teams. The founder of Natura, one of Brazil’s largest cosmetics companies, commissioned a certified 8,000-person healthy building facility after hearing Lopes directly — the technical team implemented a decision the CEO had already made. The lesson: market to whoever says “I want this,” not to whoever executes it.
How will AI change the talent standards CEOs need to hire for?
AI eliminates the middle tier of professional performance — the adequate-but-not-excellent employee who survives because clients need someone and that person is better than an intern. Allan Lopes, who already uses AI for meeting documentation and full building material analysis at the Healthy Building Certificate, frames the coming divide as binary: professionals will either use AI to excel and become more effective humans, or they will be replaced by AI in the tasks that previously made them necessary. For CEOs, this means raising the talent bar before AI becomes standard in their industry — because AI does not solve the problem of a mediocre middle layer, it removes the justification for keeping one.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Build High-Performing Teams and Scale Past Toxic Talent Ceilings
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
