In the second act of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Notorious’ (1946), Alicia Huberman—played with devastating fragility by Ingrid Bergman—begins to unravel. She is pale, unstable, unable to stand without trembling. To the household she has married into, and to the intelligence handlers watching from afar, her decline reads unmistakably as failure: the stress of the mission, the weakness of a woman too compromised by her own past, the inability of an amateur to survive professional pressure. Then comes the whisper that reconfigures everything: ‘They’re poisoning me.’ Alicia has not lost her capacity. She has lost her coffee, her medicine, her daily sustenance to a systemic, deliberate toxin administered by the very environment she was sent to infiltrate. The scene should be mandatory viewing for anyone who evaluates human performance.
Leadership literature is dense with frameworks for diagnosing underperformance: competency matrices, nine-box grids, forced distributions, performance improvement plans, and cascading review cycles. These tools share a common and often unexamined bias. They begin with the individual as the unit of analysis. They ask what the person lacks—skill, will, discipline, resilience, cultural fit—rather than asking what the system around them has introduced or removed. Alicia Huberman’s case is an extreme dramatization of a routine organizational error: the fundamental attribution error, writ large as arsenic in a wine glass, misdiagnosed as personal frailty.
Consider the executive who watches a previously stellar director miss deadlines, lose executive presence, and deliver substandard analysis for two consecutive quarters. The default managerial narrative is almost always internal. The director is burned out. They have lost their edge, their hunger, their intellectual curiosity. They cannot scale to the next level. The possibility that their deterioration is environmental—that a rival has systematically cut them out of information flows, that their budget was quietly reduced by fifteen percent, that a new political alliance has poisoned their authority, or that their best talent was reassigned without notice—requires a more patient, less satisfying inquiry. It is cognitively easier to blame the host than to diagnose the toxin.
Hitchcock films Alicia’s poisoning as a conspiracy of household mundanity. The poison is not dramatic; it is gradual, embedded in routines that appear normal and even caring. This is precisely how organizational toxicity operates. It rarely arrives as a scandal or a shouting match. It arrives as a restructured reporting line that strips a competent leader of their decision rights without changing their title. It arrives as a ‘cost optimization’ that removes the two analysts whose invisible work made the leader effective. It arrives as a cultural message, delivered in whispers rather than directives, that this person is no longer in favor with the powers that shape resource allocation. The environment changes first. The performance changes second. But the diagnosis almost always reverses the causality, blaming the victim for symptoms created by the system.
The leadership discipline required here is environmental due diligence, conducted before any individual assessment is finalized. Before concluding that a person has deteriorated, a leader must ask a sequence of uncomfortable system-level questions. What resources did this person rely upon eighteen months ago, and do they still have access to them? Whose support has shifted, and what meetings are they no longer invited to? Has their scope expanded without authority, or has their authority contracted without acknowledgment? Is there a senior figure who benefits professionally from their diminished reputation? These questions do not excuse genuine underperformance, but they distinguish between a failing employee and a sabotaged one. Alicia Huberman was an exceptional operative who appeared incompetent because her competence was being chemically neutralized by those who benefited from her silence. The same neutralization happens in corporations every day, minus the physical chemistry.
There is a further, more subtle danger in misdiagnosing environmental poisoning as personal failure. It normalizes the toxin. When leadership attributes the symptoms to the individual, the system that produced them escapes scrutiny entirely. The poisoner—whether a political rival, a broken process, or a punitive resource constraint—learns that their method works and that blame will be deflected downward. The organization develops a habit of discarding capable people rather than auditing capable systems. Over time, this creates a culture of disposable talent and untouchable process, where no one asks why the garden is dying; they simply keep replacing the plants and congratulating themselves on their decisiveness.
Alicia’s saving grace is that her poison is literal and eventually detectable. She can name it. She can, in principle, prove it. Most organizational toxins are social and invisible. They leave no blood test and no tox screen. They leave only the residue of careers that ended mysteriously, of leaders who ‘just didn’t work out,’ of promising trajectories that flattened without satisfying explanation. The executive who accepts these narratives without environmental investigation is not managing performance; they are laundering systemic failure through the convenient mechanism of individual blame. They are, in effect, the unwitting accomplices of the poisoners they failed to identify.
The lesson of ‘Notorious’ is that the first question in any performance evaluation should not be about the person’s character or commitment. It should be about the perimeter. What changed around them? If the answer is nothing, then—and only then—is the problem likely inside them. But the answer is rarely nothing. More often, someone moved the floor beneath their feet and called it gravity, then wrote them up for stumbling.