When the Right Person is in the Wrong Job
There was talk among my fellow managers of disciplinary action or even laying off the struggling Project Manager (PM). His projects were not progressing fast enough and his communication to upper management was lacking confidence. Having worked with him before and seen his solid engineering and core business skills first hand, this was really surprising. In my opinion, he showed potential but this current role wasn’t allowing him to shine.
With an opening in my team, I reached out to his manager and asked if I could transition him to an Application Engineering role on my team. The manager said it’d be worth a try. The PM was happy to be thrown a lifeline from the troubled role. I set him out with clear objectives and let him take the lead on several new assignments where he began to make great progress. His confidence grew and in just two years he was promoted to Engineering Manager. Over time he took on increasingly significant leadership roles and today leads his own department.
Just because someone is not thriving in a particular role does not mean they can’t contribute to your organization in important ways. Sometimes a bright, capable, energetic person simply isn’t a good fit for a particular position. Help them find the win-win role where their strengths will allow them to excel. In this way, you will change someone’s life by setting them on a path for success.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
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