Right Person, Wrong Seat: The Hidden Cost to Team Performance

You can understand someone completely.

And still have them in the wrong seat.

I spent years in rooms where everyone already knew a person wasn't right for the seat they were in.

They knew the decisions they were making were costing the team,
and the conversation needed to happen.

But nobody said it.
And I get why.

When you've been through hard stretches with someone,
and you know their story, and they know yours, that kind of honesty feels like a betrayal.

So you find other explanations for the slowdown.
You add a process around the gap and redistribute the work without changing anything on paper.

You tell yourself you'll revisit it next quarter.
But you never do.

I've done some version of this myself.

What I've learned is that the delay always has a cost,
and it's rarely the person who needs to move who feels it first.

It's the people around them.
They see it before anything gets said.

They've already started adjusting to compensate, routing work around the gap,
stopping certain conversations, covering ground that shouldn't be theirs to cover.

Over time, you end up with a team that's learned to work around a problem instead of through it.

That's the version of the story that doesn't get talked about enough.

When I see this pattern, I come back to these questions:

👉 Do they understand what the role demands?
👉 Do they want to own it, not just hold the title?
👉 Do they have the judgment and context to carry it when things get hard?

If the honest answer is no, the most useful thing you can do for everyone, including that person, is to say so.

Sinek said it better than I could.

If you don't understand the people, you don't understand business.
But understanding and honesty aren't the same thing.

You can know exactly who someone is and still put them in a seat they were never equipped to own.

Most leaders already know when that's happening.

The question is whether they're willing to do something about it.

Is there a seat on your team you already know needs to change?

♻️ Repost this if you know a leader who needs to read it.
And follow me, Jacob Rokeach, for more on building better teams and making clearer decisions.