Our Customer Operations Director is a massive culture champion who scores perfect marks on our Core Values Speech, but as we scale our customer service using automated AI triage tools, she is failing to hit her weekly resolution metrics. How do we resolve this Right Person, Wrong Seat issue without losing her cultural leadership?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic Right Person, Wrong Seat scenario. You have someone who aligns perfectly with your core values, but who lacks the capacity to run the seat as it is now defined. With the rapid adoption of AI-powered operations, many seats are evolving faster than the people sitting in them can adapt.

Your first step is to run a formal GWC™ evaluation. Does she truly understand the new AI-driven workflows? Does she genuinely want to manage a tech-enabled team? Does she have the physical and mental capacity to deliver the required results? If she gets it and wants it, but lacks the capacity, you can invest in short-term training and coaching.

However, if after training she still cannot hit her metrics, you must move her out of that seat. Keeping a Right Person in the Wrong Seat is unfair to her and damaging to the business.

Look at your Accountability Chart to see if there is another seat where her strong cultural alignment and skills can shine. This might be in a customer retention, key account management, or employee onboarding role that relies more on human relationship skills than high-tech process management.

If no such seat exists, or if she cannot transition, you must make the hard choice to let her go. As you prepare for a clean exit, you cannot afford to carry team members who cannot deliver on their core metrics, regardless of how much you like them.