Stop trying to fix your team. Fix how you manage them.

There’s a popular framework floating around the startup world that categorizes people into levels: task-level thinkers, project-level thinkers, owner-level thinkers. The idea is that you need to hire the right level of thinker for the job, and if someone isn’t performing, you probably hired the wrong level.

I don’t really see it that way. Some people are more tactical, some are more strategic. That’s real. But the problem I see over and over again isn’t that companies hired the wrong type of person. It’s that managers don’t know how to configure the work around the people they already have.

The default approach doesn’t work.

Here’s what usually happens. You hire someone to do a job. They get into the role and they’re not as good at certain parts of it as you expected. So you tell them to improve. You point them to a coworker who does it well. You suggest a class. You give feedback in your one-on-ones. You keep pushing them to get better at the thing they’re not naturally good at.

Sometimes that works. People do improve with clear feedback and direction. But when it doesn’t work, most managers just keep doing the same thing harder. More feedback. More coaching. More pressure. They never stop to ask whether the problem is the person or whether it’s how the work is assigned.

If you’re coaching a football team and you have a 250-pound guy who can’t run fast, you’re not going to move him from the offensive line to wide receiver. That’s obvious. But you might move him from the left side to the right side, or from offense to defense. There’s a range of positions where his size is an asset, and you find the best fit within that range.

For some reason, when people work in information jobs, managers lose that instinct entirely. They hire you as a left linebacker, and you’re going to be a left linebacker, and you need to get good at it. End of discussion.

Two designers, same team, completely different strengths.

I had two designers on one of my teams a few years back. Same role, same level. They were each responsible for all product design work on a specific pod at a software startup.

One of them was a genuinely talented designer. Strong visual work, better UX thinking, polished output. But he wasn’t always on time. He’d forget tasks. And the engineers didn’t love working with him because his handoffs were thin. He’d do great design work and explain it beautifully on a call, but he wouldn’t document anything. No specs for edge cases, no detailed behavior notes, no state documentation.

The other designer was the opposite. Good but not great. His visual work felt like he wasn’t pushing himself to his own ability. He couldn’t really think outside the box on UX problems. But he was never late. The engineers loved his handoffs because he’d write every detail down: expected behaviors, different states, exact specs. He was thorough in a way that made everyone around him more productive.

They didn’t like each other much. Each one was judging the other for the thing they weren’t good at. The first guy thought the second was mediocre. The second guy thought the first was sloppy.

Feedback first. Always.

My first move was the standard managerial approach. I told the first designer to improve his handoffs. I told the second to push himself harder on visual quality and UX thinking. I got improvements from both. But after six months, we were still dealing with the same fundamental tension. The improvements were real but incremental, and the dynamic between them hadn’t changed.

You have to start with feedback. That’s step one, always. You don’t hire someone and immediately restructure their role. A lot of the time, all people need is someone to clearly say “I need you to do this better.” That straightforward message is enough for a certain type of person to take ownership and go figure it out on their own. You never have to coach them again.

You also have to play a few real football games before you decide someone can’t snap the ball the way you need them to. You can’t just watch them struggle in practice and give up. Give the feedback, give them time, give them a real shot. If it’s still not working after months of honest effort, that’s when you get creative.

Restructuring the work.

After about six months of the feedback approach, I tried something different. We created a design operations role for the second designer. Design ops is a real discipline, but we didn’t really need it at our scale. We made it a role for him anyway. Conceptually, he was now in charge of making sure all handoffs were thorough, deadlines were hit, states weren’t missed, and the design process ran smoothly.

The first designer kept doing what he was best at: the creative work, the UX problem-solving, the visual design. I thought the second designer might be upset about stepping back from hands-on UI work, but he didn’t care at all. That was never the part of design he gravitated toward.

The results were immediate. Same team. Same people. Same skills. But the quality of our design output improved noticeably, and the rest of the organization saw it. We became an example of how every team should be run.

Here’s what I loved most about it: they liked each other after that. They stopped judging each other for their weaknesses because the weaknesses weren’t relevant anymore. They’re still friends today.

One of those designers went on to take over my role when I left. The design ops work had positioned him as someone who could orchestrate an entire design function, and when the opportunity came, the organization saw him as a natural fit. That probably changed the trajectory of his career. If I had kept pushing him to be a better visual designer, he might never have been respected enough to get that shot.

Why most managers don’t do this.

I think the majority of managers are not good managers. That’s aggressive to say, but I believe it.

The problem is that we place enormous value on traditional intelligence and not nearly enough on emotional intelligence. People get promoted because they’re smart, because they’re good at the work itself. That leads to more responsibility, which eventually means managing people. But knowing how to evaluate someone’s personality, understand their strengths, and give them feedback that’s calibrated to who they are as an individual? That’s a completely different skill set, and most people never develop it.

Most managers give feedback that’s in line with their own personality. They can’t adapt their style to the individual they’re speaking to because they can’t get out of their own head enough to do it. They know how to be strategic about business objectives. Some of them understand how to shape company culture at a high level. Very few can get all the way down to an individual basis and understand how to shape someone’s work environment, responsibilities, and relationships to set them up for success.

I spent six years in behavioral therapy, and it fundamentally changed how I manage. Not because my therapist taught me management techniques, but because the process forced me to understand my own behaviors, my defaults, where my reactions come from, and whether they’re actually serving me or just happening to me. That self-awareness translated directly into being able to see other people more clearly: understanding why they behave the way they do, what they need from me, and how to adjust my approach person by person.

I can think of multiple examples across my career where someone was let go or a situation fell apart, and there was no reason it had to play out that way. The person had ability. They just needed someone who understood how to change the environment around them. I’ve managed people who went on to work at other companies and struggled through multiple jobs where they felt like they were failing. That’s hard to watch when you know, from firsthand experience, that a different management approach would have made all the difference. A lot of that failure is on their managers.

The one thing.

If a manager came to me and said they’re struggling with someone on their team, someone who’s clearly capable but underperforming, I’d tell them to work on themselves first.

Not on their strategy. Not on their feedback template. On themselves.

Developing a deeper awareness of your own management style, how you give feedback, what your defaults are, why you react the way you do, that’s the foundation everything else is built on. You can’t see someone else clearly if you can’t see yourself clearly first.

There’s a balance between what a person likes to do and what they’re good at, and those things tend to go hand in hand. When you find that overlap and build someone’s role around it, they like their job better, they do better work, they get more done, and they do it at a higher level than someone else would. It’s cyclical. But you can’t find that overlap if you’re too busy trying to reshape someone into the role you imagined when you wrote the job description.

Stop trying to fix your team. The team might be fine. Fix how you’re managing them.