Review season, and you're about to score someone whose struggle might be the role

A review asks one question: how did they do? But you are looking at two things tangled together: how well they did the work, and how well the work fit them. Score them as one number, and you charge the person for a placement call that was never theirs.

Ratings follow people. A low mark for a fit problem costs a good person a raise, a project, sometimes the job, over something a role change would fix.

Their own results let you pull the two apart in one sitting. You need two sections, and only their real report can give them to you.

Open The Five Types of Work, near the back of their Career Discovery report. It names the work that gives them energy and the work that quietly taxes them:

• Analytical: data, logic, getting to the right answer.
• Creative: generating ideas, designing, making something new.
• Integrative: connecting people and pieces, seeing the whole.
• Influential: persuading, rallying people to a direction.
• Operational: running the system, executing, keeping things on track.

Their primary type and natural complement are where they come alive. The rest costs them.

Then open Discovering Your Strengths, earlier in the report. It ranks their real strengths and, for each, names what they genuinely do well.

Now do the split.

1. Hold the role against The Five Types of Work. List what the seat demands week to week, and mark each demand in their grain or against it. A big share against their grain means part of the struggle is the shape of the work, not the person.
2. Hold their record against Discovering Your Strengths. Walk their real year. Where their named strengths had room, how did the work land? Circle what they clearly did well when the work fit them. That counts as performance.
3. Split the shortfall in two. One pile is what they controlled and still missed. The other is what fell short only because the seat leans on work they are starved of. The first is performance you rate; the second is a fit gap you own.
4. Rate the first pile. Set the number on what they controlled, and do not let the fit gap drag it down. A misfit a role change fixes should not cost someone a rating.
5. Write the fix, separately. One line, outside the rating: the work type the seat starves, and one change you will make before the next cycle. Reshape a slice, hand off the against-grain piece, or open a real talk about a better seat.

You walk away with two things on the page: a rating set on what they actually controlled, and a plain line naming the fix. That line sits where it belongs, on your desk, not on their record. Both are fairer than the single mark you started with, and only their own results could pull them apart.