Someone's in the right team but the wrong-shaped role, and you'd rather reshape than lose them

You don't have to choose between pushing a good person out and waiting for them to leave. There's a third move, and it's usually the right one: reshape the role.

When someone is clearly on the right team and clearly not thriving, the cause is rarely the person or the company. It's the shape of the role, which kinds of work it demands day to day, drifting away from how this person is built. Shape is something you can redesign.

The read is 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 instead of taking 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, the work to protect and grow. Then open their Aligned Work Areas, the job-area cards that show where their wiring points. Those two sections are the shape the role should be moving toward.

Now build the map. One page, three columns.

1. List the role as it actually runs. Not the job description, the real week: the recurring chunks of what they do. Tag each chunk with the work type it mostly demands.
2. Sort each chunk into a column. Hold: it sits in their primary or complement, so protect it and grow them there. Hand off: it's neither, and you can see the tax it puts on them. Add: leave it blank for now.
3. Fill the Add column from their grain. Look at their Aligned Work Areas and primary type, and name one or two chunks of that work you could route in. Where does it sit today that you could move toward them?
4. 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. A swap that lands on the right wiring is a gain twice over.

At the end you hold one page: Add, Hold, Hand off, each line naming the work and who it moves to or from. 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 is what makes it hold.

Only once you've tried the reshape do you know what you're dealing with. If a role built to their grain still leaves them flat, that's real information. The move to something else is now honest instead of a guess.

Far more often it was the shape all along, and the shape is cheaper to change than a hire and a goodbye.