Sometimes it’s not the strategy failing, or the finances.

More often than many realise, the enterprise is struggling because the people are in the wrong seat, doing work that does not fully match their skills and drains their energy.

It shows up in dragging deadlines, errors and rework. Culture takes a hit too.

This is surprisingly a common pattern I’ve encountered in owner-led businesses and mission-led organisations, and one of the most expensive, because the real cost hides inside a structure that looks entirely responsible on an org chart.

Why the wrong seat is so costly.

People do their best work when the work in front of them matches what they are genuinely good at, and when it gives them energy rather than taking it.

Put a capable person in a role that fits, and the work looks effortless from the outside.

Put that same capable person in a role that does not fit, and performance decays. Even when everybody is working harder than ever.

That last part is what makes it so hard to see.

The people in the wrong seats are usually working hard. Effort is not the problem.

The problem is that the effort is being spent in the wrong place, and no amount of it closes the gap, because the gap is structural, not a matter of trying harder.

A construction business that did not need more managers.

I started working with a construction business in the depths of a crisis in the years after the global financial crisis. They were in real trouble, the type that ends a business.

A large project they had taken to keep the doors open through the downturn was running at a heavy loss, impacting profits and draining cashflow. Three directors, a genuine business with a long history, and a real risk of not making it through.

The first work was the heavy lifting. Stabilising the cash position, refinancing, working alongside the directors through the immediate danger.

I did that work with them, not from across a desk, but alongside them. It’s also how I learnt deeply about the enterprise and the people in it.

As the opportunity arose, I asked each of the three directors a simple question. What part of the work do you enjoy? All three said the same thing in their own words, independent of each other, and without hesitation. Being on site, working with the crew, building.

That mattered more than it might sound, because not one of them was doing it.

Some years earlier, an expert in the construction industry had told them how a business of their size was supposed to operate. As the directors, they were to sit above the business, and staff would report to them. They would employ construction and project managers to run the sites and contract administrators to handle the paperwork, and the directors would manage from the office.

It was conventional, credentialed advice, and on an org chart it looked exactly right.

What it did was take three capable people off the sites and away from what they were good at and enjoyed. Instead, they were sitting in roles in an office running a structure that existed mostly to compensate for their absence.

Running in parallel with the financial work, I went through the operations. The layer the expert had recommended was not only costing the directors their best work. It was duplicating itself.

The contract administrators and the accounting function were doing overlapping work, the same information handled twice. We streamlined the accounting system and the reporting, and as we did, the duplication became impossible to justify. An entire layer of contract administrators came out of the business.

And, when the directors went back to site, something the reporting had been built to provide started arriving for free. With the three of them on the ground every day, they saw exactly what was happening on each job as it happened. The elaborate reporting that had been constructed to tell them what was going on was now reporting on things they could see with their own eyes. It was no longer needed. The construction-management structure built to run the sites was no longer needed either. Another layer came out.

The combined labour saving was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

But the saving was the smaller part of it.

The jobs started running profitably again, because the people who knew how to run them were running them. The directors were doing the work they had told me they loved, which meant they brought energy to it. Profit recovered and then climbed past where it had ever been before.

The expert’s advice had not been wrong.

Plenty of construction businesses are run exactly that way. It was wrong for these three people, because it built a structure around a template instead of around them, and that structure nearly cost them their business.

An organisation that did not need to grow.

A similar pattern showed up in a mission-led organisation, a charity, with a good community purpose.

Their thinking was reasonable and generous.

To reach more of the people they existed to serve, in areas they could not yet properly cover, they would scale up, open in new locations, and extend their own front-line delivery into those areas.

Before they committed to it, the board called me in to review the business case. I looked at where the organisation’s real strength sat, and with that, what skills and alignment existed with all the people. Not where they assumed it should sit, but where the capability and the energy of their key people aligned.

And it was not in running expanded field operations.

It was in raising awareness, telling the story, and bringing in support and funds. That was the work they were genuinely good at, and the work that energised them.

So instead of expanding their own delivery, they changed what the organisation did. Rather than build front-line operations in unfamiliar areas from scratch, they raised funds and awareness, directing money to similar organisations already delivering on the ground in exactly those areas.

The people they existed to serve were better off and reached sooner. Not because the organisation worked harder, but because it stopped trying to force itself into a shape that did not fit its people and started doing the thing that its people could be great at, and that they genuinely enjoyed.

The seat, not the effort.

In both cases the issue was alignment in skills, and with that, enjoyment and energy.

The construction directors had been told to fit into roles that they didn’t enjoy.

The charity was about to add operations that their people neither had the capability or the interest to deliver.

In both cases the fix was to realign, and realignment meant honestly assessing what the people at the centre could deliver.

That is the key detail worth remembering.

When a capable business or a committed organisation is straining, it is worth stopping to ask whether the people at the centre are in the right seats at all.

Not whether they are working hard enough. They almost always are.

The work in front of them must match what they are good at and what gives them energy.

Where it does not, the honest answer is rarely more structure. It is realignment.

Alignment, not heroism.

None of this is a soft observation about job satisfaction bolted onto the commercial work.

In the construction business, removing the layers was the commercial fix and the human fix in the same move. The seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and the directors’ return to the work they loved were not two separate outcomes. They were the same decision, seen from two sides.

That is a core part of the work I do.

I find where the structure has been built around a template, instead of around the people at the centre, and put the two back into alignment.

Get the alignment correct and the enterprise performs. The people running it do the work they are capable, and enjoy, lifting energy and outcomes.

The wrong seat is expensive on the people and the enterprise.