Yours Should.
You have hired good people. You have run the engagement survey, restructured the comp plan, sent the managers to leadership training. For a quarter or two it felt better. Then the same problems surfaced again, wearing slightly different clothes. The turnover in the same department. The department that struggles to perform. The key role you can’t keep someone in.
When a problem keeps returning after you have treated it, you are looking at a symptom. The cause is structural, and structure does not respond to programs. It responds to diagnosis. This is the work most organizations never staff for, and it is the reason the cycle repeats.
Employee behavior is rational. People respond intelligently to the currents around them, currents they often cannot name themselves. When an entire department behaves in a way that frustrates you, the behavior is telling you something true about the system those people are operating inside. A leader who can read that system finds the cause. That is the capability that ends the cycle.
The person whose job this is, or should be, is your most senior people leader. For most of the last few decades that role was defined by administration: compliance, benefits, comp, the machinery of employment. Software is now absorbing that machinery quickly, and absorbing it well. What remains, and what was always the higher-value work, is the ability to diagnose the organization as a human system.
What remains, and what was always the higher-value work, is the ability to diagnose the organization as a human system.
They make the invisible visible.
So when you hire your next CHRO, the capability worth more than any line on the resume is whether the person can do this. Most cannot, and it is no fault of theirs. Nothing in the path built it. An MBA taught them to read a balance sheet. No program taught them to read an organization.
- You can recognize the ones who can. A leader who has this capability does a few things differently in the first months on the job:
- They diagnose before they prescribe. They spend their early weeks finding out what is actually happening before they propose a single change.
- They treat behavior as information. When a team is underperforming, they ask what the system is rewarding. You cannot fire your way out of dysfunction.
- They look past the obvious lever. In my experience the cause is almost never money, though money is the first place everyone wants to look.
- They make the invisible visible. They can show you the currents your people are swimming against, the ones no one inside the company could name on their own.
This capability has no name on the market yet.
There is no credential that certifies a leader can do it, no degree that confers it. That is changing, and we are the ones building the discipline that does. It has a name, Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping, and it has been put to work across nearly every industry in the country. The way it reads an organization, and the reason the same problems stop coming back once someone finally does, is laid out in full in Sink or SWIM.
The CEOs who learn to require this capability stop solving the same problem twice. The cycle ends, because someone has finally diagnosed what was underneath it.
For the HR Leader on the Way Up
If you are building toward the executive seat, this is the capability that will set you apart, and almost no one is developing it on purpose. You have the credentials, and maybe the MBA on the way. The next and rarer thing is the ability to walk into an organization and read why its people behave the way they do.
It is not taught yet. There is no course for it and no credential that proves it. That is changing, and the leaders who build the eye now will be the ones the market starts asking for. You can begin the way the strongest already have: learn to see behavior as rational, to read dysfunction as a property of the system, and to find the currents your colleagues are swimming against before you propose a single fix.
Start with Sink or SWIM. The lens is laid out in full.
Dustin Snyder is the founder of Wayforward Associates, specializing in organizational diagnostics and change management for companies at critical inflection points. The Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping (SWIM) process developed by Snyder at Wayforward provides leadership teams with actionable insights and implementation roadmaps that consistently generate workforce buy-in on necessary change. To explore whether your organization could benefit from this approach, visit wayforward.work/ohi to complete the Organizational Health Index.
