Someone's in the right team but the wrong-shaped role, and you'd rather reshape than lose them
This is for you if someone on your team is worth keeping but not thriving, and you're weighing whether to let them go. You'd rather reshape the role than lose them.
There's a third move, usually the right one: reshape the role.
The cause is rarely the person or the company. It's the role's shape, the kinds of work it demands, drifting from how they're built. Shape you can redesign.
You can read it in their results. Open their The Five Types of Work, near the back of their Career Discovery report. It names the two kinds of work that give this person energy, not take it:
- 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 and complement are their grain, to protect and grow. Then open their Aligned Work Areas, the cards showing where their wiring points. Those two sections are the shape the role should move toward.
Build the map: one page, three columns.
- List the role as it actually runs. Not the job description, the real week: the recurring chunks of what they do. Tag each with the work type it demands.
- Sort each chunk into a column. Hold: it sits in their primary or complement. Hand off: it's neither, and you can see the tax it puts on them. Add: leave blank for now.
- Fill the Add column from their grain. Look at their Aligned Work Areas and primary type, and name one or two chunks you could route in. Where does it sit today that you could move toward them?
- Answer "to whom" for every hand-off. The chunk that drains this person is often someone else's grain. Check your team's work types and name who takes each hand-off because it fits them, not because they're free.
At the end you hold one page: Add, Hold, Hand off, each line naming the work and where it moves. Then one sentence to open your next 1-1: "I want to reshape your role toward X, add this, take that off your plate. What have I got wrong?" From there they shape it with you, which makes it hold.
Only after the reshape do you truly know. If a role built to their grain still leaves them flat, then you've learned something real. Letting them move on is honest now, not a guess.
Far more often it was the shape all along, and shape is cheaper to change than a hire and a goodbye.
