I’ve watched this pattern repeat across different organizations and industries: a role isn’t working, performance is slipping, and the instinct is to replace the person. A new hire arrives with energy and credentials. Within months, they’re frustrated. Within a year, they’re often gone. The role hasn’t improved. The cycle repeats.
The assumption underneath this cycle is straightforward – find someone more capable and the problem resolves. But capability isn’t the issue when the role itself is broken. A broken role is one where the expectations, resources, reporting lines, or scope don’t align with what’s actually needed to succeed. No amount of talent compensates for that misalignment.
I’ve seen this most clearly in roles that sit between departments or that have grown without intention. A project coordinator role, for instance, that was designed to manage one type of project but now handles three, with stakeholders from five different teams, reporting to a manager who doesn’t understand project work, and a budget that hasn’t changed in four years. The person in that role isn’t failing because they lack skill. They’re failing because the role itself is incoherent.
What “Broken” Actually Means
A broken role doesn’t always announce itself clearly. Sometimes it’s obvious – the person is drowning in conflicting priorities or lacks the authority to do their job. Other times it’s subtle. The role might look reasonable on paper but collapse under the weight of unspoken expectations or dependencies that no one documented.
I’ve encountered roles where the title and the actual work diverged so much that no one could describe what success looked like. A “business analyst” who was actually doing data entry and report formatting. A “team lead” with no budget authority, no hiring power, and no real decision-making capacity. These aren’t people problems. They’re design problems.
Another common pattern: roles that require constant context-switching between incompatible work streams. Someone managing both operational firefighting and strategic planning, with no separation between the two. The operational work always wins because it’s urgent. The strategic work never happens. The person gets blamed for lack of initiative, when the role itself made strategic thinking impossible.
Sometimes the broken part is invisible to the hiring manager. A role reports to someone who is disengaged or hostile. The previous person left because of that relationship, not because the work was hard. A new hire walks into the same dynamic and hits the same wall.
Why Hiring Masks the Real Problem
Hiring a new person feels like action. It’s concrete. You can measure it: post the job, interview candidates, make an offer. It feels like you’re solving the problem. And for a brief moment, you might be. A new person brings energy. They don’t carry the frustration of the previous person. They haven’t yet learned all the ways the role doesn’t work.
But that honeymoon period obscures what needs to actually change. If you hire without first understanding why the role is broken, you’re just resetting the clock. The new person will eventually hit the same constraints, the same unclear expectations, the same resource limitations. They might last longer than the previous person if they’re more patient or more adaptable. But they’ll still be working within a broken system.
I’ve seen organizations go through three or four cycles of this before someone stops and asks a different question. What if we didn’t replace the person? What if we fixed the role first?
Diagnosing Before You Recruit
The work that should happen before posting a job is uncomfortable. It requires looking at the role honestly and asking questions that might expose organizational dysfunction. Why did the last person leave? Not the polite version they gave in their exit interview – what were they actually frustrated by? What parts of their job couldn’t they control? Where did they lack authority or resources?
It also means being specific about what the role actually needs to accomplish. Not what you wish it would accomplish, but what it realistically needs to do given current constraints. If the role is genuinely doing the work of two people, you might need to split it or hire two people. If it’s caught between competing priorities, you need to resolve which priority actually matters most.
I’ve found it useful to spend time with the person currently in the role, if they’re still there. Not in a performance review context, but in a genuine diagnostic conversation. What’s working? What’s impossible? Where do they feel set up to succeed and where do they feel set up to fail? If they’ve already left, talk to them anyway if you can. They often have clarity about what was broken that the organization hasn’t acknowledged yet.
Look at the reporting structure. Does this role report to someone who understands the work? Do they have the authority to make decisions about how the work gets done? Is there a mismatch between what the role is accountable for and what it can actually control?
The Structural Issues That Hiring Won’t Touch
Some broken roles have structural problems that no individual can overcome. A role with unclear scope will remain unclear no matter who fills it. Someone needs to decide what’s actually in scope and what isn’t. That decision has to come from above the role, not from within it.
A role that requires coordination across departments but has no formal authority to demand that coordination will always be difficult. The person in that role will spend energy negotiating and persuading instead of doing the actual work. You can hire someone with exceptional interpersonal skills, and they might navigate it better, but you haven’t solved the structural problem. You’ve just found someone who’s better at workarounds.
Resource constraints are similar. If a role genuinely needs a budget that it doesn’t have, hiring a more resourceful person won’t change that. They might be more creative about finding workarounds, but they’re still working with insufficient resources. That’s not a hiring problem.
I’ve also seen roles broken by unclear success metrics. What does good performance look like? If that question can’t be answered clearly, the person in the role is always guessing. They might guess well, or they might guess wrong, but they’re never working from a clear standard. That needs to be defined before you hire, not discovered after.
When Hiring Is Actually the Right Move
There are situations where hiring is the right answer. When a role is well-designed but the person in it genuinely isn’t capable of doing the work, replacement makes sense. When someone is in the wrong role but the role itself is sound, moving them and hiring someone better suited is appropriate.
But those situations are clearer when you’ve first diagnosed whether the role is broken. If you haven’t done that work, you can’t tell the difference between a person problem and a role problem. You’re guessing.
The organizations I’ve seen handle this well do the diagnosis first. They spend a few weeks understanding what’s actually not working. They make changes to the role – clarifying scope, adjusting reporting lines, reallocating resources, or splitting the position. Then, once the role is coherent, they hire. The new person walks into something that’s actually designed to work.
Does it take longer? Yes. Does it feel less like action? Yes. But the person who gets hired into a well-designed role has a much better chance of succeeding. And the organization stops cycling through people in a broken position.
