Kirsten Nicol
July 1, 2026
I keep a tally of what comes up in advisory calls. Most months it's a mix of topics. Cashflow here, a pricing problem there, someone wrestling with a growth decision. Not this month.
This month it was people. Then people. Then more people.
Ten-plus advisory conversations, and almost every single one circled the same challenge: someone on the team who isn't performing. Someone who won't take feedback without sulking. Someone who's gone complacent. Someone who doesn't respect the person who signs their payslip. Someone too green for the seat they're sitting in, buckling under pressure they were never set up to handle. And the one bigger issue nobody says out loud: someone who's simply not the right person for the job, and everyone knows it, but it’s not acted on.
If that's been your experience too, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not the problem, and you are not alone. ‘People’ are the single most common thing keeping good owners up at night, and right now it's happening at scale.
So let's talk about the uncomfortable truth underneath all of it.
Most "people problems" aren't people problems. They're fit problems wearing a people costume.
When someone's underperforming, the instinct is to manage harder. More check-ins, more feedback, more scripts, more patience. And sometimes that's exactly right. A good person in the wrong support structure can come right fast. But sometimes you're pouring energy into a hole that will never fill, because the person was never the right fit for that seat in the first place. No amount of managing harder turns the wrong person into the right one. It just exhausts you both.
Here's the test I kept coming back to in these calls. If this role were empty tomorrow, would you hire this person back into it? If the answer is a flinch (a clear no), you already know. You're not managing a performance issue. You're avoiding a fit decision.
This is the bit that flips people. We hang on to the wrong hire because letting them go feels cruel. It feels kinder to keep paying them, keep hoping, keep absorbing the cost.
It isn't.
Keeping someone in a seat they can't succeed in is one of the unkindest things you can do, to them, to the team carrying the slack, and to you. They know they're failing. The team knows it too. The whole place quietly recalibrates around the lowest standard you're willing to tolerate. Complacency isn't a personality trait that appears out of nowhere. It's what grows when people watch underperformance go unaddressed. Your team's standard is whatever you walk past.
Letting the wrong person go, done with dignity, done properly, frees them to find a seat they can actually win in, and frees you to put the right person there. That's not failure. That's the job.
It wasn't all hard. Some of the best moments this month were with owners who'd cracked it. Owners who found genuinely brilliant people and watched their business change shape almost overnight, even if they had found a different seat for them. One great hire in the right seat can do what three average ones never will. So if you've done that recently, celebrate it loudly. That's the whole game.
If you're staring at a people problem right now, ask the fit question first. Don't reach for the performance-management playbook before you've been honest about whether the person and the seat were ever a match. Get proper HR advice before you act. Please, this is the part where doing it right protects everyone, including you. But don't let "getting it right" become another month of avoidance.
Right person, right seat. Everything good in your business is downstream of that. And the wrong person in the wrong seat, however nice they are, however long they've been there, is a decision you're making every single day that is negatively impacting your business.
This month, a lot of you made the hard call. I'm proud of you for it!
If this topic hit a nerve, and for a lot of you it will have, this is worth a proper conversation. Getting the right people in the right seats, planning your team a year ahead, working out who's a fit issue and who just needs better support: this is exactly the kind of thing we work through with owners. No pitch, just a clear handle on your team and a plan for what's next.
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