13 Warning Signs Your Team Has Wrong People in Wrong Roles

You have talented people on your team. You hired well. They have strong track records, good intentions, and the kind of capability that should be driving results. But something is off. Projects stall. Energy is low. People who should be thriving look exhausted. And despite all the talent in the room, the team consistently underperforms.

The problem might not be your people. It might be where you have put them.

One of the most common and most invisible problems in organisations today is role misalignment, having the right people sitting in the wrong seats. It is invisible because the person is competent. They can do the work. They just cannot sustain it, not without burning through their energy, their motivation, and eventually their commitment to the team.

Gallup research reveals that people who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work, three times more likely to report an excellent quality of life, 8 percent more productive, and 15 percent less likely to quit. The flipside is devastating. When people spend their days doing work that drains them, they disengage. They burn out. And eventually, they leave. This is not a soft skills issue. This is a strategic performance issue that costs organisations millions.

Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius model provides one of the clearest frameworks for understanding this problem. Every person has two areas of Working Genius (work that gives them energy and joy), two areas of Working Competency (work they can do but that does not light them up), and two areas of Working Frustration (work that actively drains them). When someone spends the majority of their time in their frustration areas, they will burn out regardless of how talented they are. And the team will suffer regardless of how much talent it contains.

I work with leadership teams around the world as a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally). Whether I am facilitating an executive offsite, a school leadership workshop, or a board strategy session, role misalignment is one of the first things I look for because it explains so many symptoms that teams have been trying to solve in other ways. Here are 13 warning signs that your team has the wrong people in the wrong roles, what is really going on, and what to do about it. If any of these sound familiar, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org and let us talk about what your team actually needs.

1. A High Performer Has Become a Low Performer and Nobody Knows Why

This is the most classic warning sign. Someone who used to deliver exceptional work is now producing average results. They miss deadlines they would have hit easily a year ago. Their attention to detail has slipped. The instinct is to treat this as a performance issue. It is almost always a role fit issue.

When a person is promoted into a role that requires different strengths, or when their role gradually shifts to emphasise their frustration areas rather than their genius areas, performance drops. Not because they have become less capable, but because the work itself is now working against their natural wiring. The type of work someone does matters more for burnout than the volume of work, as Lencioni has noted. A leader forced to spend all day on detailed execution when their genius is in ideation will feel drained even if they are technically working fewer hours.

What to do about it: Do not start with a performance improvement plan. Start with a role audit. Ask the person what parts of their role give them energy and what parts drain them. Then compare their answer to what their role actually requires. The gap between those two things is your diagnosis. A Working Genius session can make this gap visible in under an hour. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how this works.

2. Initiatives Keep Stalling at the Same Phase

Every project and initiative moves through predictable phases. In the Working Genius framework, these are Ideation (Wonder and Invention), Activation (Discernment and Galvanizing), and Implementation (Enablement and Tenacity). If your team consistently generates brilliant ideas but never executes them, you likely have a gap in Enablement or Tenacity. If execution is strong but innovation is stagnant, the gap is in Wonder or Invention.

A tech startup struggling with product development delays discovered that while they had strong Galvanizing and Invention on the team, they lacked Enablement and Tenacity. Promising ideas remained undeveloped and team members grew frustrated. The pattern repeated until they deliberately recruited for the missing geniuses and restructured roles to match each person's strengths.

What to do about it: Map your team's geniuses against the three phases of work. Identify where the gaps are. Then either redistribute responsibilities, hire for the missing genius, or partner with someone who brings what you lack. Read The Six Types of Working Genius Book Summary for a full breakdown of the six types and how they work together.

3. Someone on Your Team Is Exhausted Despite Not Being Overworked

This is the role misalignment red flag that gets misdiagnosed most often. The person is not working excessive hours. Their workload looks manageable. But they are visibly running on empty. The usual response is to suggest better work-life balance, take a holiday, or explore wellness resources.

None of that will fix the problem if the root cause is that they are spending most of their day in their Working Frustration areas. A person whose genius is in Wonder and Invention but whose role demands Tenacity and Enablement will feel exhausted after a normal eight-hour day because the work itself is draining them at a neurological level. It is not about hours. It is about alignment.

What to do about it: Have a conversation about energy, not workload. Ask: "What tasks give you energy? What tasks drain you?" Then look at how their actual week breaks down. If more than 50 percent of their time is in draining work, you have found the problem. This is one of the most powerful things a Working Genius team session reveals, people suddenly understand why they have been exhausted and it has nothing to do with effort. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org to learn how I facilitate these sessions.

4. Your Best Innovator Has Been Promoted into a Management Role

This is one of the most common role misalignment mistakes in organisations. Someone is exceptional at generating ideas, solving creative problems, or seeing possibilities that others miss. So you promote them. Into management. Where they now spend their days in meetings, managing budgets, handling personnel issues, and doing administrative work that has nothing to do with their genius.

Gallup found that teams that focus on strengths every day have 12.5 percent greater productivity. When you take your strongest innovator and bury them in management tasks, you lose their innovation and gain a mediocre manager. Everybody loses. The person knows it too. They feel the mismatch, but they cannot articulate it because the promotion was supposed to be a reward.

What to do about it: Separate career progression from management responsibility. Create pathways for people to grow in influence, compensation, and impact without requiring them to manage people or processes that drain them. The Working Genius framework helps teams see that leadership is not one thing. It takes all six geniuses to lead well, and different roles can leverage different types of leadership. Read 100 Proven Tips for Working Genius in the Workplace for practical examples.

5. Meetings Feel Like Everyone Is Speaking a Different Language

If your team meetings feel like people are consistently talking past each other, the issue may not be communication skills. It may be that people with different Working Genius profiles are approaching the same problem from fundamentally different angles, and nobody has a shared language for understanding why.

A person with the genius of Wonder asks "what if?" and gets frustrated when the team immediately jumps to "how." A person with the genius of Tenacity wants a clear plan and gets frustrated when the conversation keeps circling back to new ideas. A person with Discernment says "I do not think that is right" and gets labelled as negative, when they are actually providing their most valuable contribution: accurate evaluation.

What to do about it: Give your team a shared language for how each person contributes. When everyone understands the six types of Working Genius, what previously felt like conflict starts to feel like complementarity. The person who slows things down is not being difficult. They are providing Discernment. The person who keeps raising new possibilities is not being unfocused. They are contributing Wonder. This reframe alone can transform team dynamics. I facilitate Working Genius sessions that create this shared language in a single half-day workshop. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org for details.

6. One Person Is Carrying the Team and Everyone Knows It

If there is one person on your team who seems to hold everything together, who is the go-to for every problem, who works the longest hours and carries the most weight, you do not have a star performer. You have a structural problem.

This typically happens when one person's genius aligns with the team's biggest gap. They fill it because no one else will. It works in the short term, but it creates a single point of failure and guarantees that person's burnout. Gallup data shows that if your manager focuses on your strengths, your chances of being actively disengaged are only 1 in 100. But if one person is forced to operate across all areas, including their frustrations, because the team has not distributed work effectively, that protection evaporates.

What to do about it: Map the team's genius distribution. Identify who is carrying weight in areas that are not their natural strength. Then redistribute. This is not about being fair with workload. It is about being strategic with energy. A Working Genius team map makes this distribution visible instantly, and I have seen teams completely restructure how they operate within a single session. For the broader framework on building healthy teams, read 183 Tips to Build Your Team: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Summary.

7. New Hires Keep Failing in the Same Role

If you have cycled through multiple people in the same position and none of them have succeeded, the problem is almost certainly the role itself. The job description probably demands a combination of geniuses that is unrealistic for one person, or the actual work does not match what was advertised.

This is a more expensive version of role misalignment because it involves repeated recruitment costs, onboarding costs, and the productivity loss of constant turnover. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs between one-half to two times their annual salary. Multiply that by three or four failed hires and you have a significant financial problem caused by a job design problem.

What to do about it: Before hiring again, audit the role. Break it down into the types of work it requires using the Working Genius framework. Does the role demand Wonder and Tenacity? Those are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and very few people have both as geniuses. You may need to split the role or redesign it so that it plays to a realistic genius profile. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org if you want help with this before your next hire.

8. Your Team Avoids Certain Types of Work and Nobody Talks About It

Every team has work that nobody wants to do. That is normal. But when specific types of work consistently fall through the cracks, when follow-up does not happen, when details are missed, when new ideas dry up, when nobody rallies the team around a decision, it is not a discipline problem. It is a genius gap.

If your entire leadership team has Working Genius in Invention and Galvanizing but Working Frustration in Enablement and Tenacity, you will generate incredible energy and terrible follow-through. The pattern will repeat across every project because it is baked into the team's composition.

What to do about it: Name the gap. When teams can see their collective genius map, the pattern becomes obvious. "Of course we never follow through. We have zero Tenacity on this team." That awareness alone changes behaviour. Then you can deliberately recruit for the missing genius or partner with another team that has what you lack. This is one of the most powerful outcomes of a Working Genius team session, and I facilitate these for leadership teams around the world.

9. People Are Frequently Volunteering for Work Outside Their Role

When team members consistently gravitate toward tasks that are not in their job description, they are telling you something important: their genius lies somewhere other than where you have placed them. A finance manager who keeps offering to facilitate brainstorming sessions is showing you their Invention genius. An operations leader who spends their spare time mentoring junior staff is showing you their Enablement.

This is not insubordination. It is self-correction. People naturally seek work that aligns with their genius because it gives them energy. When their role does not provide that alignment, they look for it elsewhere.

What to do about it: Pay attention to what people volunteer for. It is often a more accurate indicator of their genius than any assessment. Then ask yourself whether the role can be reshaped to include more of what energises them. Even a 20 percent shift in how someone spends their time can dramatically change their engagement and productivity. Read 29 Simple Strategies on How to Improve Team Dynamics for more practical ways to restructure team roles.

10. Feedback Is Being Misinterpreted as Criticism

In many teams, the person with the genius of Discernment gets labelled as the negative one. They evaluate ideas carefully, identify risks, and point out flaws. This is an incredibly valuable contribution. Without Discernment, teams make poor decisions, waste resources, and pursue ideas that should have been filtered out early.

But if the team does not understand Working Genius, Discernment looks like criticism. The person with this genius starts to feel unwelcome or difficult. They either suppress their natural contribution (which hurts the team) or leave (which hurts the team even more). Gallup found that employees who feel their strengths are focused on are 61 percent more engaged. When Discernment is treated as a flaw rather than a genius, you lose that engagement.

What to do about it: Normalise Discernment as a critical team function. When the team has a shared language for Working Genius, the person who says "I am not sure about this" stops being the problem and starts being the filter that protects the team from bad decisions. I have seen teams go from frustration to genuine appreciation for their Discernment members in a single Working Genius session. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how this might work for your team.

11. You Have Leaders Who Are Great with People but Terrible with Detail, or Vice Versa

Some leaders are extraordinary at rallying a team, building relationships, and creating momentum. Give them a spreadsheet or a detailed implementation plan and they fall apart. Other leaders are meticulous, thorough, and reliable executors. Ask them to inspire a room or generate creative solutions and they freeze.

Neither of these is a weakness. They are natural reflections of where each person's genius lies. The problem occurs when the role demands both, or when a leader is judged against criteria that do not match their wiring. If you evaluate an Invention/Galvanizing leader on their attention to detail, they will always look inadequate. If you evaluate a Tenacity/Enablement leader on their strategic vision, they will always look limited.

What to do about it: Stop evaluating everyone against the same criteria. Different roles require different geniuses, and your performance frameworks should reflect that. More importantly, build teams where these different geniuses complement each other rather than competing. The goal is not to find people who are good at everything. It is to build a team that is collectively good at everything. This is exactly what Working Genius reveals, and it is why I start most executive offsites with a team genius mapping session.

12. People Describe Their Role in Terms of What They Endure, Not What They Enjoy

Listen to how your team members talk about their work. Do they describe it in terms of what excites them, what they are building, what they are contributing? Or do they describe it in terms of what they get through, what they survive, what they tolerate?

Language reveals alignment. A person in their genius says things like "I love the creative part" or "I am energised when I help the team solve problems." A person in their frustration says things like "I just need to get through this quarter" or "the best part of my day is when I finish." When you hear survival language from talented people, you are looking at role misalignment.

What to do about it: Use language as a diagnostic tool. In your next one-on-one with each team member, ask them to describe the best part of their week and the worst part. The best part is where their genius is. The worst part is where their frustration is. If the worst part dominates their role, something needs to change. This does not require a complete restructure. Sometimes small adjustments, delegating one type of work and adding another, can shift someone from surviving to thriving. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org if you want to explore how a Working Genius session could help your team have these conversations.

13. You Are Reading This and a Specific Person Comes to Mind

If you have read through these 13 warning signs and kept thinking of the same person, trust that instinct. You can see the mismatch. You can feel it. The question is whether you will do something about it.

Most leaders avoid this conversation because they do not have a framework for it. Telling someone "I think you are in the wrong role" feels confrontational. But the Working Genius model provides a completely different frame. It is not "you are failing." It is "the work you have been asked to do does not match where you naturally contribute your best." That is a conversation about design, not performance. And it is a conversation that almost always brings relief rather than resistance.

What to do about it: Have the conversation, but come with a framework. Start by having the person take the Working Genius assessment. Then sit down together and compare their genius profile with what their role actually demands. The gaps will be obvious to both of you. From there, you can explore what needs to change. This is work I do with teams regularly, and the relief on people's faces when they finally understand why they have been struggling is one of the most rewarding things I get to witness.

What to Do Next

If you recognised several of these warning signs in your team, here is where I would start.

Step one: Have each member of your team take the Working Genius assessment. It takes 10 minutes and reveals each person's two geniuses, two competencies, and two frustrations.

Step two: Map the team. Look at where your collective geniuses and gaps are. This will immediately explain patterns you have been observing for months or years.

Step three: Have an honest conversation about role alignment. Use the framework to discuss where each person's current role matches their genius and where it does not. Then start making adjustments.

I work with leadership teams, school leadership groups, and boards to facilitate exactly these conversations. A Working Genius team session typically takes half a day and gives teams a shared language and actionable insights that they can apply immediately. I also facilitate sessions using the Five Dysfunctions of a Team framework, DISC workshops, and StrengthsFinder, depending on what the team needs most.

I am the author of Step Up or Step Out, which has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and I host The Leadership Conversations Podcast with more than 230 episodes and listeners in over 150 countries. My Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference achieved a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating.

If your team has talented people who are not thriving, the problem might not be the people. It might be the seats. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org and let us figure out together what needs to change.

FAQ

What is the Working Genius assessment?

The Working Genius is an assessment developed by Patrick Lencioni that identifies six types of work: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. Every person has two geniuses (work that gives them joy and energy), two competencies (work they can do adequately), and two frustrations (work that drains them). The assessment takes about 10 minutes and provides immediate clarity on where a person contributes their best work. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, I help teams apply these insights to improve performance, reduce burnout, and restructure roles. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to learn more.

How do you know if someone is in the wrong role?

The clearest indicators are sustained energy drain despite manageable workload, declining performance from a previously strong contributor, and the person gravitating toward tasks outside their job description. When someone consistently lights up doing work that is not in their role and looks flat doing work that is, you have a role alignment issue. The Working Genius assessment makes this visible by comparing a person's genius profile with their actual role demands.

Can role misalignment cause burnout?

Absolutely. Lencioni's research and Gallup data both confirm that the type of work matters more than the volume. People who spend their days in their Working Frustration areas burn out even if their hours are reasonable. Gallup found that employees who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged and 15 percent less likely to leave. Role misalignment is one of the most common and most overlooked causes of burnout in leadership teams.

What if my entire team has the same genius profile?

This is more common than most leaders expect, especially in teams that have been built through cultural fit rather than strategic composition. A team of Wonder/Invention geniuses will generate extraordinary ideas but struggle with follow-through. A team heavy on Tenacity will execute reliably but lack innovation. The solution is to identify the gaps and either recruit for them, partner with other teams, or create structures that compensate for the missing genius. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how a team mapping session could help.

How is Working Genius different from StrengthsFinder or DISC?

Working Genius focuses specifically on the type of work that gives you energy versus the type that drains you. StrengthsFinder identifies broader talent themes, and DISC focuses on behavioural and communication styles. They are complementary rather than competing tools. In my experience, Working Genius is the fastest to apply practically because it maps directly to how work gets done on a team. I facilitate sessions using all three frameworks and often recommend starting with Working Genius because it gives teams the quickest insight into role alignment issues.

What does a Working Genius team session look like?

A typical session takes half a day. Each team member takes the assessment beforehand. In the session, we reveal individual results, build a team map, identify collective gaps, and discuss practical implications for how the team operates. The conversation that follows is usually the most valuable part, because people finally have language for frustrations they have felt but could not explain. I facilitate these sessions in person across Australia and internationally, as well as virtually. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to book a session or discuss what your team needs.

NEXT READ: 10 Warning Signs Your Executive Team Is Dysfunctional (And What to Do About It)

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who works with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements.

To book Jonno for your next Working Genius team session, leadership offsite, or keynote, email jonno@consultclarity.org.