How To Read The System Before You Fix The Person
In this episode of Culture Focused Practice, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explains why a “people problem” may actually be the point where a larger system problem becomes visible.
Missed deadlines, dropped handoffs, sharp interactions, and avoided responsibilities are important data, but they don’t tell you why something happened. Before deciding an employee is lazy, difficult, or wrong for their role, leaders need enough context to understand what kind of problem they’re actually looking at.
Tara covers four agenda items:
- Where the system becomes visible: One person’s behavior may be the end result of unclear expectations, conflicting priorities, missing authority, or a breakdown in communication.
- Context explains behavior without erasing choice: Understanding the conditions surrounding a mistake helps leaders separate what belongs to the system from what belongs to the person.
- The diagnosis determines the intervention: Coaching, clarifying ownership, repairing a relationship, redesigning a role, and applying consequences solve different problems. The response needs to match the cause.
- Your response becomes part of the next system: How leaders investigate, give feedback, repair, train, or react teaches the organization how mistakes will be understood and handled.
Using a story about an employer changing Tara’s role without communicating the new expectations to her, she shows how a system failure can make one person look like the problem. She also explains when repeated avoidance becomes a genuine people issue, and why redesigning an entire process around one person’s choices creates new problems for everyone else.
The takeaway: choose one current “people problem” and ask, What if it isn’t them? What conditions could be producing the behavior you’re seeing, and what response actually fits the diagnosis?
Timestamps
- 00:00 Welcome and Premise
- 00:45 People Problems or System Signals?
- 02:31 The Four Agenda Items
- 02:57 Where the System Becomes Visible
- 03:49 When an Uncommunicated Role Change Looks Like Underperformance
- 08:40 Context Explains; It Doesn’t Excuse
- 12:02 When It Really Is a People Issue
- 14:21 The Diagnosis Determines the Intervention
- 17:21 Fair Responses and System Design
- 19:44 Your Response Shapes the Next System
- 20:56 Making Space for Leadership Emotions
- 22:54 Key Takeaway: What If It Isn’t Them?
- 25:34 Wrap-Up and Goodbye
Related Episodes
- Episode 104: Accountability Is A Design Problem Before It Is A People Problem
- Episode 86: Designing a Hiring System (Instead of Trusting Your Gut)
- Episode 66: Accountability ≠ Assholery - How to Address the Problem Without Wrecking the Person
Think about one employee behavior that is frustrating you right now. Before trying to fix the person, ask what information, authority, clarity, or support may be missing from the system around them.
Subscribe to Culture Focused Practice and share this episode with a therapy practice owner or leadership team that may be treating a system problem like a people problem.
