Stop Fixing People: Improve Employee-Role Fit
When a capable employee struggles, most organizations follow a predictable script: clarify expectations, provide coaching, document performance, and, if nothing changes, replace the person.
It is a familiar process. It is also frequently aimed at the wrong problem. What executives label a performance issue may actually be an employee-role fit issue. The person may have the right intelligence, experience, and commitment but spend most of the day doing work that conflicts with how they operate best.
Organizations are surprisingly comfortable redesigning systems, products, and customer journeys. But when work itself is badly designed, they often try to fix the human being trapped inside it. That is expensive. Poor alignment between people and their work affects productivity, decision quality, motivation, retention, and execution. It can also cause leaders to remove capable employees while preserving the conditions that made success unlikely. My conversation with Dr. Kevin Gazzara, CEO of Magna Leadership Solutions, reinforced a leadership principle that deserves more executive attention: before concluding that someone cannot perform, examine whether the organization has positioned that person to perform. Gazzara is a management and leadership expert, executive coach, and former Intel leader who spent part of his career managing the company’s leadership development programs. His work on flow and task preferences offers executives a more useful way to diagnose performance: look beyond the position and examine the actual work.
Job Titles Conceal How Work Really Gets Done
Executives tend to discuss talent through the language of roles, reporting structures, competencies, and job descriptions. Those mechanisms are useful, but they provide an incomplete view of performance.
A job title tells you where someone sits. It does not tell you what consumes that person’s attention. Two employees with the same title may experience fundamentally different jobs. One may spend the week resolving immediate problems. The other may focus on recurring processes, long-term initiatives, or stakeholder relationships. The organizational chart treats them as equivalent. Their calendars tell a different story. Gazzara’s task quotient framework separates work into three broad categories: routine work, troubleshooting, and project work. His central point is not that one category is superior. It is that people have different preferred combinations, and those differences influence how energized, effective, and empowered they feel.
A strong troubleshooter may thrive when conditions are ambiguous, the pressure is real, and someone needs to make sense of a problem quickly. Put that same person into a role dominated by repetitive processes, and the organization may interpret declining energy as disengagement. A leader who excels at building systems and advancing defined projects may appear indecisive when forced to spend every day reacting to personnel issues and operational disruptions. That does not automatically make the person a weak leader. It may reveal a mismatch between the leader’s strengths and the job the company has actually created. This is why vague demands to “improve performance” often fail. The organization is addressing the visible symptom while leaving the operating conditions untouched.
Employee-Role Fit Is an Execution Issue
Work design is sometimes dismissed as a soft human resources concern. That assumption should be retired. If an employee takes months to recruit and train, misalignment carries a direct financial cost. When that employee leaves, the company absorbs another round of recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and institutional knowledge drain. The remaining team inherits additional work, creating the conditions for more turnover. The effects also reach customers. Understaffed or constantly rebuilding teams respond more slowly, make avoidable mistakes, and struggle to maintain consistent service. Managers spend their time filling gaps rather than improving operations. Strategic work is delayed because immediate work keeps winning.
That is not an engagement problem floating somewhere on the cultural fringe. It is an execution problem. Gazzara described a medical organization experiencing roughly 32% to 33% turnover among relatively highly paid employees. According to his account, employees required approximately 18 months of training, yet many were leaving around the nine-month mark. The organization was repeatedly investing in people who departed before the training investment could fully pay off. The turnover also contributed to a backlog of records requiring analysis for physicians. Attrition was therefore creating two forms of damage: recurring replacement costs and operational delays. Leadership initially viewed at least part of the situation as a people problem. One employee, Bill, was considered such a poor fit that his manager expected to terminate him. The closer examination produced a different diagnosis.
The Person Marked for Exit May Be Misassigned
Using the task quotient process, Gazzara and the organization examined how the work was distributed. They found that the manager, Leroy, was better suited to routine and project-oriented work than to constant troubleshooting. He also preferred working with processes over managing the demands of a 30-person team. Bill had the opposite problem. He had been assigned process-heavy responsibilities, while his strengths were centered on people. The organization did not need a dramatic restructuring. It needed to rebalance the work. Leroy subsequently moved into another part of the business where he could concentrate more heavily on projects and processes. Bill stepped into the people-leadership work that better matched his strengths. The employee who had been discounted as a likely termination became an effective fit once the work changed.
According to Gazzara, the organization’s turnover later fell from approximately 33% to roughly 16% or 17%. That is a company-reported client result and was not independently validated for this article. Still, the example illustrates an important diagnostic principle: apparent underperformance can be created by task allocation, not merely by inadequate talent. The lesson is not that every struggling employee is secretly a star. Sometimes performance is poor. Sometimes behavior is unacceptable. Sometimes separation is the correct decision. But leaders should be able to distinguish between a person who cannot do the work and a capable person who has been assigned the wrong work. Too many companies skip that diagnosis and head directly toward remediation.
Stop Hiring Only for the Skills You Need Today
The same mistake begins before an employee joins the organization. Gazzara argues that many companies hire primarily for skill when they should place greater emphasis on talent and cultural fit. His point is not that skills are irrelevant or that companies should hire unqualified candidates. It is that specific skills can often be developed more easily than a person’s underlying preferences, learning potential, or alignment with how the organization operates. Job descriptions make this problem worse when they become exhaustive inventories of everything the previous employee did. Instead of defining the outcomes the business needs, companies assemble a wish list of responsibilities and search for a mythical candidate who enjoys all of them equally. Then they act surprised when the person who loves strategic projects does not enjoy constant firefighting, or when the natural relationship builder struggles in a role dominated by solitary process administration.
Leaders should ask better questions during hiring and role design:
- What outcomes must this role produce, and which activities genuinely drive those outcomes?
- What proportion of the work involves routine execution, troubleshooting, project development, or people leadership?
- Which capabilities must exist on day one, and which can be learned?
- Does the candidate’s preferred way of working match the job as it actually operates?
These questions will not eliminate hiring mistakes. They will expose mismatches that a conventional skills checklist can hide.
Leadership Development Must Start at the Top
Better work design cannot survive inside a culture that contradicts it. Gazzara has found that leadership development is most effective when senior executives participate, model the expected behaviors, and reinforce the tools throughout the organization. When top leaders ask consultants to “fix” middle managers while remaining authoritarian, unreceptive, or inconsistent themselves, the effort has limited reach. No workshop can compensate indefinitely for executive behavior that punishes the practices taught in the workshop. Middle managers can influence upward, and they often have more influence than they realize. Gazzara recommends beginning with a candid question: How am I contributing to this problem, and what can I do differently? That is not an invitation to absorb responsibility for every executive dysfunction. It is a practical starting point for influence.
Leaders in the middle can frame recommendations in ways that allow senior leaders to remain credible, participate in the solution, and maintain an appropriate sense of control. Coaching up is not manipulation. Done well, it is the ability to improve a decision without turning the conversation into a contest over status. However, executive sponsorship still matters. If the senior team refuses to examine its own behavior, the organization will eventually discover the limits of bottom-up transformation. Culture follows what leaders repeatedly reward, tolerate, and demonstrate, not what appears in the training deck.
Safe Failure Produces Better Leadership Decisions
Correcting employee-role fit requires experimentation because no assessment can perfectly redesign an organization on paper. Gazzara advocates simulations that allow leaders to fail without making the failure fatal. Leaders can practice decisions, observe their patterns, and connect what happened in the simulation to the conditions inside the company. I think of this as a conference-room prototype. Before reorganizing a department, executives can model alternative task distributions. Before replacing someone, they can test whether shifting responsibilities changes performance. Before promoting a high performer, they can examine whether the new role depends on entirely different kinds of work. The objective is not to remove risk. It is to make learning less expensive.
Companies often claim they want innovation while treating every failed attempt as evidence of poor judgment. That creates a predictable result: employees protect themselves, avoid experiments, and continue operating flawed systems because changing them feels more dangerous than tolerating them. Leadership is not developed by observing leadership from a safe distance. It requires practice, reflection, and enough psychological safety to admit when the first answer was wrong. The condition, of course, is disciplined experimentation. Failure should generate information. A failed test that produces no reflection, changed assumption, or better decision is not learning. It is simply waste wearing an innovation badge.
Redesign the Work Before Reorganizing the Company
Executives do not need to launch an enterprise-wide transformation to begin applying these ideas. Start with one team where turnover, missed deadlines, low engagement, or recurring performance issues are affecting results. Examine what people actually do, not what their job descriptions claim they do. Compare the task mix with individual strengths and preferences. Look for work that consistently drains one employee but energizes another.
Then test a rebalance before changing reporting lines or eliminating positions. This requires more than letting employees choose only the assignments they enjoy. Every job contains necessary work that is not personally energizing. The objective is not perpetual comfort. It is a sustainable mix that allows people to contribute at a high level without spending nearly all their time operating against their strengths. Leaders must also protect against turning preferences into permanent labels. People develop. Business needs change. A task assessment should begin a management conversation, not end one.
Finally, do not confuse fit with sameness. Hiring for cultural fit should not become permission to hire people who think, communicate, and behave exactly like the existing leadership team. The relevant question is whether someone can succeed within the organization’s values and operating expectations while bringing capabilities and perspectives the business needs.
The Executive Challenge: Diagnose Before You Replace
Employee-role fit is not an excuse for weak accountability. It is a demand for better executive diagnosis. When performance drops, leaders should examine expectations, capability, behavior, management quality, workload, task alignment, and operating conditions. Replacing the employee should be a conclusion reached after that work, not the opening assumption. This week, identify one capable person in your organization whose performance has become a recurring concern. Before scheduling another corrective conversation, map the work that person actually performs. Determine how much is routine, troubleshooting, project-based, process-oriented, or people-centered. Then ask whether the role is using the person’s strengths or steadily working against them. You may still conclude that the person needs to improve or leave. But you may also discover something more uncomfortable and more valuable: the employee was not the broken part of the system.
Before you fix the person, fix your view of the work.
