If you want to eliminate your bottom line, remove employee morale, and slam your company without realizing it, there is a sure way to do it: put the wrong person in the wrong seat.
It happens every day. High-performance individual competitors are bounced into management due to tenure rather than talent. Despite the disconnect, the executive still sticks to his title. Mid-level managers still exist because they are “good” but lack teeth to drive. Leadership turns a blind eye – because confrontation is uncomfortable, change is destructive, and mediocrity is comforting.
and then? Rotten begins.
The hidden cost of company complacency
Let us be cruel and honest. Most companies are making money and don’t even realize it. Not because of market downturns or inflation, but because they bear the weight of death. Inefficiency in human resources and disconnection resulted in a loss of $8.9 trillion in employee engagement.
The cost of missing talents is not only a staggering sum of money, but also as sinister as slow-growing cancer, transferred to the ground. This is how it plays:
- Talent waste: Your A player (who should shape the future) takes this time to clean up the mess of insufficient, wrong colleagues. They are not innovative, they are nannies. They do not lead, but buffer incompetence. Guess what it is? They were exhausted.
- Cultural Erosion: When the wrong person plays the wrong role, the workplace becomes toxic. A high-performance person is out of leadership, distrusts his leadership, either checks out permanently or attributes his glory directly to your competitors.
- The death of bureaucracy: Bad breeding bureaucracy. When people lack executive skills, they make up for it with meetings, emails, and endless indecision. Paralysis began. The company you once keenly starts moving at the speed of molasses, with its own inefficiency.
- Deterioration in customer experience: Have you ever interacted with a company that felt like a slow-motion train wreck? Ignorance managers, disengage employees, make customer service frustrating – all are symptoms of people who misalign their roles. Customers cannot tolerate incompetence. They left. They won’t be back.
How leadership fails (and why they are too afraid to fix it)
Let’s be a reality – Actors love to talk about “talent optimization”, but when it comes to hard calls, they hesitate. Why?
Because firing someone who is “nice” but doesn’t work can make them uncomfortable. Because it is embarrassing to face their performance decline with long-term employees. Because readjustment can force them to admit that they have hired bad employees.
So they avoided it. They comforted them. They proved to be justified. They convince themselves that the employees who failed for months simply “need more time” or “loyalty” made up for incompetence in some way. But in doing so, they betray their best talents, erode their culture, and bleed money from the organization.
Cruel (but liberated) truth: No one is immune to reassessment
The solution is simple, but not for the faint of heart. Everyone in your organization, including C-Suite, needs to be evaluated against three non-negotiable criteria:
- ability: Do they have the skills, knowledge and experience to perform effectively? Do they have a deep understanding of the organization’s goals?
- Culture suitable for: Are their values, beliefs and behaviors aligned with the company’s mission, values and long-term vision?
- drive: Do they operate with hunger, ownership and a ruthless commitment to progress?
If an employee fails one of these tests, they do not belong to the seat. This is very simple. This means a difficult conversation. This means tissue discomfort. But it’s the truth – if someone isn’t delivering on a special level, they’ve stolen it from you. They are making money from the business, wasting energy from the team, and actively promoting the company’s competitive advantage.
Cruel talent readjusted ROI
Your organization changes when you start making decisions based on alignment rather than sentiment. This happens when the right person is in the right seat:
- Productivity Skyrocket: Teams move faster. The decision is clear. Execution becomes seamless. No wasted exercise – only motivation.
- Innovation flourishes: When people are in a role that can play to their strengths, they create. They solved the problem. They push boundaries. The entire organization becomes an incubator for changing the game’s ideas.
- Cultural enhancement: The toxicity evaporates when every employee is surrounded by high-quality colleagues. Work becomes energetic and not exhausted. Keep improving, participation soars.
- Profitability explosion: Let’s talk about numbers. Companies that optimize talent allocation won not only in the culture, but also on the balance sheet. Income climbed. Cost reduction. The bottom line reflects the hard fact: when the right people are in the right place, businesses thrive.
The final wake-up call: Are you protecting the future or in the past?
If you are a leader organization, ask yourself: Are you protecting the future of your company or protecting poorly performed comfort? If your answer is not immediate and obvious, you already have a problem.
That’s the thing – the organization’s factor won’t fail. They failed because they tolerate mediocrity. They stick to outdated hierarchies. They reward talents for tenure. The most dangerous phrase in American companies is: “This is exactly how we do things here.”
The company that will rule the future is a company with a new paradigm – a seat is occupied by a person who is explicitly and undeniably suitable for the job.
No exception. No excuses. Not dead.
Do you want to win? Start making difficult decisions. Now.
Kelly Meerbott is an acclaimed TEDX and keynote speaker, writer, podcast host and award-winning certified leadership expert. Kelly used a unique traumatic approach and PTSD training to change the leadership landscape of hundreds of C-suites and senior executives, and transformed more than 400 senior officers.
