A seat on your team sat empty longer than you wanted. You finally found someone who looked right on every measurement that usually matters. Their resume showed their experience, the interviews gave you all the feel-good moments, and the references – those top logos on them encouraged you to believe this was the one. Then a few months in, the output isn’t nearly where you expected, the team is in disarray, and a quiet suspicion starts to form. Did I hire the right person on my team?
Sometimes that’s exactly what happened. Bad hires are real. But the question you are asking shouldn’t be whether they were a bad hire but instead, was the role this person walked into fully and strategically designed, or was it assumed?
That difference is where a surprising number of performance problems are born.
The wish list that pretends to be a role
Here’s the pattern I’ve seen in the hiring process more than almost any other. A position opens up, there’s pressure to fill it, and someone writes a job description in an afternoon. What ends up on the page is closer to a wish list than an actual blueprint for success in the role, and much of it comes from looking at the title in other companies rather than what’s needed in your own. The job description now captures what the team hopes this person will be like and a rough sketch of the tasks no one else wants responsibility for. What it rarely captures is the actual result the role exists to produce, and what the work genuinely demands from whoever sits in it.
The new hire starts, and the expectations begin to drift from one week to the next. The role is more and more ambiguous as the days and weeks go on because nobody defined what success concretely looks like, so success becomes a moving target that shifts with whoever happens to be frustrated that day. Performance comes out uneven, and everyone acts surprised. The reality becomes evident that the person was set up to struggle from the beginning, and it had very little to do with their capability.
Gallup has been measuring this quietly for years. In their 2025 data, only about 47 percent of employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work, and clarity of expectations was one of the engagement elements that fell most sharply over the last few years. So we’re looking at a workforce where more than half of people are operating without a clear picture of what they’re supposed to deliver. Gallup also ties improvements in that clarity to real gains in profitability and work quality, which tells you the fuzziness isn’t a soft problem living off in the culture somewhere. It carries a number.
The blueprint you’d never skip anywhere else
Think about how an architect works. Nobody pours the foundation before there’s a drawing everyone has signed off on. You would refuse to approve that, and you’d be right to. Yet in business we routinely bring people into roles that were never really drawn up, and then we expect speed and a steady, predictable output as though the structure had been there all along.
That’s a design gap, and it has a habit of showing up wearing the costume of a performance gap. The symptoms look like a people problem, so that’s where all the attention goes. Meanwhile the actual fault line sits in the architecture, untouched, generating friction that everyone feels and no one can quite name, ready to break the next person you drop into that seat just as reliably as it broke the last one.
What designing the role first actually means
Designing a role before you fill it comes down to a handful of honest questions asked in the right order. What result does this role exist to create for the business, beyond the list of tasks it involves? And what does the work genuinely demand from a person in order to produce that result? A role built on structure and steady follow through asks for something very different than one that runs on speed and a willingness to move before everything is certain. Precision and depth matter enormously in some seats and barely register in others, where the whole point is inventing something that wasn’t there before. Knowing which of these you’re actually hiring for changes everything about who will thrive once they’re in the chair.
If you had those answers before you brought someone in, you were building on a blueprint. If you didn’t, you were gambling with what remains the largest line item on your P&L, which is your people. That isn’t a criticism. It’s just an accurate description of the risk most hiring quietly carries when the role underneath it was never finished.
The cost of solving the wrong problem
When productivity drops, replacing the person feels like the decisive move. It’s often the most expensive one though, and not only for the reason you’d expect. The commonly cited figure from the U.S. Department of Labor puts the cost of a bad hire at roughly 30 percent of that person’s first-year earnings, a number that has been repeated so widely and for so long that it’s best treated as a rough floor rather than a precise measurement. SHRM’s replacement estimates run considerably higher once you factor in lost productivity and the drain on everyone working around the struggling seat. Either way, the money leaving the building is real.
Here’s the part that stings. If the role was the actual problem and you replace the person anyway, you pay that whole cost and inherit the same failure. The architecture is still broken. All you’ve done is reset the clock on it. A far cheaper first move is to go back to the design and ask whether the role was ever clear, whether it was built for what the work genuinely requires, and whether anyone was measured against a real definition of success. A good portion of the time the fix is sitting right there in the structure, and once you sort it out, performance turns into something you can actually plan around.
One more layer
Designing the role first takes productivity out of the realm of a coin toss. It won’t solve everything, and it isn’t meant to. There’s a second kind of mismatch that surfaces even when a role is beautifully built, where the work is clear and well designed but the person’s natural wiring doesn’t match what that work asks of them. That one is a different animal, and it’s the subject of the next piece in this series. The encouraging news is that it’s just as fixable once you can see it for what it is.
If you’re watching capable people underperform and it’s starting to show up in your numbers, that’s a signal worth diagnosing properly before you act on it. The 14-Day Strategic Alignment Audit is built to do exactly that. You can start there at audaciousconceptsinc.com, reach me directly at support@aliciacouri.com, or book a conversation at MeetWithAlicia.com. And if you want this kind of thinking landing in your feed, my LinkedIn newsletter Aligned, Audacious and Agile is where it lives.