In short: Most people problems aren't new problems. They're workarounds that stopped working. The fix isn't a full HR overhaul. It's picking the one problem your team keeps circling back to and finally solving it before Q4 planning eats the runway you have left this year.
Think about your organization for a moment.
Is there a manager who everyone knows needs a little more help? A process only one person understands? An employee issue that gets handled, settles down, and then resurfaces a few months later?
If any of that sounds familiar, you're not alone. Many organizations we work with have at least one people problem they've learned to manage around instead of solve. For a while, that can be perfectly reasonable.
Someone covers for the manager. The one person who knows the process fields another question. Leadership steps in on the employee issue one more time. An exception gets made because figuring out the bigger issue can wait until things calm down.
The catch? Things rarely calm down, and organizations can get remarkably good at working around problems they should be solving.
A Workaround Doesn't Feel Like a Problem
That's what makes it easy to tolerate.
The work is still getting done. The manager who struggles with tough conversations is otherwise valuable. The employee creating friction is also a strong performer. The undocumented process keeps running because the person who understands it hasn't gone anywhere.
Maybe it feels like every company your size has a manager who needs coaching or a process that lives in one person's head, so it seems less like a problem and more like the cost of doing business. If everyone else is managing around it too, it must be fine.
It's worth asking the harder question anyway. How much time does someone else spend compensating for that manager? How often does a senior leader get pulled into a discussion that should have been handled a level down? How much of the team's energy goes into working around the one difficult employee instead of doing their jobs?
The cost of a people problem rarely shows up where the problem lives. Once you start looking for those hidden costs, it's hard to stop noticing.
Temporary Solutions Have a Way of Becoming Permanent
Every business needs workarounds sometimes. That's just being practical. The trouble starts when no one can go back to fix the underlying problem.
The CEO becomes the person managers call whenever an employee situation gets complicated. The office manager gradually becomes the HR department because someone has to handle benefits, policy questions, and everything in between. A longtime employee becomes the keeper of processes no one ever documented. Managers develop their own approaches to similar employee situations because there isn't a consistent playbook to follow.
None of this happens on purpose. But there's a reason it's so hard to walk back once it starts. Once people commit to a way of doing things, even informally, they feel pressure to keep doing it that way. Mainly because it matches how they and everyone else are already behaving. The CEO who personally handles every hard employee conversation starts to see it as part of the job. Handing it off starts to feel harder than it actually is.
But repeat a workaround long enough, and it becomes your operating model.
Then the Business Changes
What works at 30 employees doesn't necessarily work at 60.
More people bring more managers, more decisions, more communication, and more opportunities for inconsistency. And that's when something interesting happens. The manager problem becomes a retention problem. The inconsistent process becomes an employee relations problem. The undocumented knowledge becomes a business continuity problem. The executive who routinely steps in to solve people issues realizes there are now too many issues to keep stepping into.
The organization didn't suddenly develop these problems. It just reached the point where the old workarounds couldn't carry the load anymore.
Which Problem is Worth Fixing?
You don't need to fix everything at once. In fact, don't try.
Pick one problem that your organization repeatedly spends time working around. Maybe a manager needs coaching and clearer expectations. Maybe an employee situation needs to be addressed instead of managed around. Maybe an important process needs to get out of someone's head and into a system other people can use. Maybe managers need clearer authority so routine decisions stop landing on your desk.
Or maybe the person who's been handling HR alongside three other responsibilities needs access to expertise so they don't have to figure everything out alone.
Start with the one problem that keeps coming back. Every time your organization works around the same issue, you're investing more time in preserving the problem than it would take to fix it.
September is a Good Time to Stop Working Around One Thing
There are four months left in the year. That's enough time to make meaningful progress on something you've been tolerating but not so much time that it makes sense to keep putting it off until "later."
Before Q4 accelerates and planning for 2027 takes over, ask your leadership team one question:
What problem have we gotten really good at working around?
Then follow it with another:
If nothing changes, what will we spend another year doing to compensate for it?
You don't have to solve every people challenge before December 31. Solve one. And make sure it's one you won't have to keep working around next year.
Not sure where to start? Let's have a conversation.
