You Need the Right Person in the Right Role
by Stefanie Wild Furrer and Marcos R Leal
Most organizations think they have a talent gap. In reality, many have a placement gap.
They’ve hired capable people — ambitious, skilled, and ready to grow. But something’s off: momentum slows, decisions bounce, leaders start to micromanage, and teams get stuck. The symptoms look like underperformance.
Have you ever faced the challenge of being asked, based on very ambitious dreams, to hire the best person for that specific narrowed need? Then, after a few months, you see an unused talent and unmatched dreams.
What is the reason?
Unclear strategy?
Gut-based hiring?
or,
Simple misalignment between capability and context?
High performers in the wrong context underdeliver, become disengaged, or leave. Worse… they may disrupt team cohesion or slow innovation if cultural or structural misalignment exists.
Talent is not just about hiring. It’s about orchestration.
Talent goes beyond hiring or moving people inside an organization. It’s like conducting a symphony. It’s not just about finding great musicians but also about arranging the right ensemble, tuning each instrument, and conducting in sync with the rhythm of change.
True talent strategy is the art of aligning skills, timing, and purpose to create harmony across the organization.
From Founder’s Intuition to Organizational Structure
In the early days of a company, founders often rely on instinct. They know who they trust. They move fast. Roles are fluid. And that works — until it doesn’t.
Clarity becomes critical as complexity increases — more markets, more products, more people. What was once a strength (flexibility, improvisation) becomes a bottleneck.
One company we supported had hired a brilliant Market Intelligence leader with 20 years of experience working in a global firm: excellent credentials, a strong track record, and incredible drive. Within six months, she was frustrated, isolated, and delivering below expectations. Why? Because the organization wasn’t ready to absorb her profile, and a constantly changing strategy could not hold such strong and long-lasting knowledge. The onboarding was weak; the KPIs changed, and the plans were disintegrated within 6 months. Her excellence had no system to plug into.
In Stef Furrer’s work developing high-performing teams across cultures and industries, a recurring theme emerges:
“How do I ensure that my organization has the right talent in place to drive growth and navigate the complexities of an ever-evolving market?”
The Right Role Isn’t Just a Title
Being in the right role means:
- The function has a role to play in the organization’s current and future ambitions
- The responsibilities are clear, and the incumbent is accountable for outcomes and decision rights
- The role will evolve as per the company’s strategy, not legacy org charts
- The surrounding team complements their strengths (and compensates for their blind spots)
And sometimes, it means the person needs to shift roles to unlock their full potential — even if they’re doing “fine.”
We’ve seen companies move COOs into market-facing roles, data analysts into product strategy, and founders into structured innovation labs—with incredible results. This is not because the people changed but because the context was redesigned.
Talent Strategy is Business Strategy
Companies can no longer afford to let roles evolve passively, especially during scale-up, M&A, or restructuring phases. The founder has an important role. As the company evolves, so do the founder’s role and respective staff. A CEO may soon need a strong operations person to scale things in a structured way and a bold finance leader who goes beyond balance sheets while the founder keeps inspiring people, setting strategic partnerships, and driving commercial progress.
(Read more about challenging decision-making processes in our recent articles: Governance: When Everything Changes, Who Gets to Decide? and The Founder’s Crossroads: Making the Leap from Builder to Legacy Maker)
Many companies still define roles based on legacy structure, whereas in reality, roles are shifting rapidly, often requiring cross-functional thinking, digital fluency, and emotional intelligence (aka flexibility and resilience). As the market evolves, following trends and new tools, and companies shift, roles should also be considered evolving containers of values, having their success metrics constantly reviewed to adjust to change.
One of the most common — and costly — traps organizations (no matter the size or background) may fall into is structuring the business around existing capabilities and leadership, rather than designing it based on what the company truly needs to grow and succeed in the long term.
It’s understandable. When people are already in place, they naturally tend to shape roles and structures around them. However, this comfort-driven approach often leads to misalignment between strategy and execution. The organization ends up being built for the past, not the future.
The risks are significant!
Teams may deliver only incremental progress instead of breakthrough results. Critical capabilities—like digital, data, or customer-centric design—can remain underdeveloped. Leadership may become too homogenous, relying on familiar thinking and resisting necessary change. Internal mobility can stall, frustrating high-potential talent who feel boxed in by structures that no longer serve the business.
When structure is shaped to protect what exists rather than enable what’s possible, change becomes harder, slower, and more political. Reorganizations feel personal, and resistance builds.
On the other hand, when organizations take the time to define what the business actually needs — what future success looks like, what capabilities matter most, and what leadership will drive it — they can then intentionally design the structure to support that vision. From there, talent decisions become clearer: who fits, who can grow into the role, and where new capabilities are needed.
KOMPASSIUM often runs short strategic sessions to help companies:
- Map current vs. required capabilities across the business
- Identify “hidden leaders” and underleveraged profiles
- Stress-test key roles against near-term strategy shifts
- Design onboarding for integration, not just information
When one high-growth health tech client clarified its strategic pillars and rebuilt its leadership map accordingly, execution speed increased dramatically— not by adding headcount, but by tapping into the potential of people already on the team (and by making sure that strategy is updated and the team is aligned)
How to Start Rethinking Role Fit
If you’re sensing stagnation, friction, or leadership fatigue, it might be time to audit role fit:
- Thinking systematically, where are people waiting for directions they should own?
- Who is overperforming in the wrong lane?
- Which roles exist because they always did, not because they should?
And then go deeper:
- Are you hiring people you know how to integrate?
- Are you designing roles around strategic goals or personalities?
- What decisions are people expected to make — and do they know that?
Final Thoughts
Putting great talent in the wrong role is like buying a high-performance engine and leaving it in the garage.
Great leaders don’t just hire well. They configure well. Then, “they conduct the musicians throughout the symphony”
Execution doesn’t come from having the best people. It comes from putting the right people in the right place and giving them the clarity, trust, and structure to move.
Having the right talent in the right place is no longer about filling boxes on an org chart. It’s about constantly realigning capabilities to value creation, designing adaptive roles, and unlocking potential wherever it exists.
The question for modern leaders isn’t just “Do we have the right people?” It’s: Are we building the right environments for the right people to thrive in the right ways?
References:
Sources:
- KOMPASSIUM: Internal meetings and articles (2025)
- Korn Ferry, 2023: “Why Leadership Role Fit Matters More Than Ever”
- Harvard Business Review, 2021: “Stop Wasting Great Talent”
- Insights from KOMPASSIUM projects and leadership assessments (2023–2025)
