Have you lived this before? The improvement plan is on its third version. The person it was written for cares about the work and would be described by everyone on the team as someone they want around. None of that is changing the problem, which is that the work they’re responsible for keeps arriving late and half right.
So the plan gets rewritten with more detail, because the last version must not have been clear enough, and that buys one more quarter.
Somewhere in the middle of version three, a different thought shows up and gets pushed away. This person may be in the wrong seat.
Being open to that possibility is harder than it sounds, because the moment you entertain it you have to do something about it. And hope the other person is open to the change too.
Signs an Employee Is Not a Good Fit for the Seat
It often looks like a performance problem, which is why the first response is almost always a “performance plan”.
Effort stays high while the output is unpredictable. Coaching produces one good month, and then the old pattern returns because the role doesn’t match how the person thinks or their current skillset.
One signal matters more than the rest, and it has nothing to do with what someone is doing badly. Someone in the wrong seat usually knows it before their manager does, even if they don’t quite have the words or courage to admit it. They’re passionate about the mission and organization. They often make great contributions, just not in their department.
Why the Conversation Gets Delayed for Years
Two things keep a leader from saying it out loud.
The first is that the conversation feels like a judgment on the person when really it’s a question about the seat. Those are different, and the difference is the entire conversation. “You are not performing” backs someone into a corner and creates the need to defend. “The work in this seat has moved away from what you are good at” is a description of a job, and a job can be changed.
The second is The Wall, the divide we create between ourselves and others, rather than being 100% open. It goes up in the leader long before it goes up in the employee. You have already predicted the conversation in your mind: an awkward hour, a hiring process there is no time for, a good person who may leave over it. Once that prediction is made, you stop being open to any version of the conversation that could go well. Once it is up, no other possibility can emerge in your mind.
So the “performance” plan gets rewritten again, and everybody stays frustrated.
Be Open to the Possibility That You Are Wrong
Openness runs both directions here, and the second direction often gets skipped.
You might be wrong about which seat suits them, and that possibility deserves the same weight as the first one. Managers develop a perception of an employee inside the first ninety days and then spend two years collecting evidence for it. The person who looks scattered in project work may be the strongest person on your payroll when dealing with a frustrated customer, and nobody has put them in front of one.
You might also be wrong about what the seat needs now. Roles drift over the years without anybody rewriting them. Work that was mostly relationship building three years ago is mostly reporting today, and the person hired for the first version is being measured against the second one.
Two questions are worth answering honestly before you walk in. What is my goal for this conversation? What assumptions am I making that might not be true?
How to Open the Conversation
Agree on how you are going to communicate before you talk about the seat. The Agreement does that work:
“Will you agree with me on how we’re going to communicate? I want you to be 100 percent honest, meaning be truly and freely yourself, speaking into what you want and how you feel. I promise you I will be 100 percent open to it. I will listen without reservation; I’ll put my needs and wants on pause for you. In return, I will be honest with you, and I ask that you be completely open to it.”
It changes what happens next, because the person across from you now knows that honesty is what you are asking for. What comes out of their mouth has a better chance of being the real thing than the version they believe protects their job.
Then ask, and leave the question genuinely open. Where does this work fit you, and where does it feel like pushing uphill?
The answer is frequently the diagnosis. A lot of people have been waiting for permission to say they are in the wrong seat. They have been running Fake You (the facade we project rather than being 100% honest) through every one-on-one for a year, because the honest version sounds to them like asking to be fired.
What Changes When You Name It
Naming the seat does not always end in a new seat. Sometimes the work gets redrawn and one piece of it moves to a person better suited to it, and the person stays where they are and gets better at a job that now fits. Sometimes they leave, and they leave knowing exactly why, which is the difference between an exit and a wound.
What changes in every version is that the thing everybody could see finally gets said. Your team has been watching this for longer than you have. They know who is struggling and they know you know, and they have been drawing their own conclusions about what honesty is worth on your team while you rewrote the plan.
The fourth version of that plan will produce the same result as the first three. The conversation underneath it is the one that changes something, and it requires radical honesty with yourself before it requires anything from the other person.
Find out how open and how honest you are before you walk in. The Pursuit of Honesty Assessment takes about ten minutes and gives you two scores, one for openness and one for honesty, at knowhonesty.com/assessment. The full process is in Know Honesty, available on Amazon.