A Diagnostic for Culture Fit Worth Bringing Into Your Clients

Your client is sitting across the table from you, not saying the thing you both already know. 

There’s someone on their team who isn’t working out, and they’ve been avoiding the conversation for months. You’ve been in this room before, and it rarely resolves itself without someone naming it out loud.

This week’s guest on the podcast is Hans Kirkegaard, a Fractional COO who has made this exact call more times than he can count, in his own companies and as an advisor to others. Hans spent fifteen years building and selling a multi-business rollup, ran the number two seat at a SaaS startup, and worked alongside Jen Hamilton at the same Fractional COO firm. Today he runs a vacation rental company in Sarasota, Florida, built on EOS. His framework for sorting people problems is worth adding to your own diagnostic toolkit.

Wrong Seat and Wrong Person Are Two Different Problems

Hans doesn’t talk about “underperformers.” He draws a hard line between two problems that get lumped into one lazy sentence, and the line matters because the fix is completely different on each side.

A wrong seat problem is a skills and fit problem. Someone is doing work that doesn’t play to what they’re good at, and it shows up as sloppy output, missed deadlines, and a person who’s quietly miserable working outside their lane every day. That’s fixable, sometimes with nothing more than moving them to the right seat.

A wrong person problem is values. Hans is blunt: you cannot coach values. If someone is misaligned with how the company actually operates, not the poster on the wall, the real, lived version, they’re a drag on the business today, next month, and next year. It only gets worse.

This is a useful first question to bring into your next client session: which one are you actually looking at (skills vs values)? Most clients have never separated the two, which means they’ve been trying to coach their way out of a values problem, or firing their way out of a skills problem.

The Values Test That Needs No Workshop

Hans has a test for sorting this that has nothing to do with a performance review. He calls it a bucket exercise. There are people you’d call on a Friday night with zero notice and know they’d show up. There are people you see once a year, have a great time with, and don’t think about again until next year. And there’s a third bucket: people who, the moment you meet them, make you want to go home and take a shower. You don’t always know why. You just know.

That gut reaction, he says, is the client’s values talking even when they’ve never written them down. His test for defining a company value directly: what would get someone fired here, even if it’s never been said out loud? The opposite of that answer is the real value.

Worth asking a client to write that list down, then checking whether their actual behavior backs it up. The gap between the two is usually where the avoided conversation is hiding.

The One Sentence That Ends the Conversation Clean

Once Hans has made the call that someone is a wrong person, not a wrong seat, he doesn’t muddy the water. No committee language, no “the team decided,” no long list of grievances. One sentence: “I have made a decision that our time together has come to an end.” No blame, no debate, no opening for the other person to argue their way back in.

The coaching happens before that moment. The decision, once made, stays simple. This is language worth handing directly to a client who’s dreading a termination conversation and doesn’t know how to keep it from spiraling into negotiation.

Fix the Scorecard Before You Fix the Person

For the wrong seat problem, Hans’s fix is less dramatic and more useful day to day: fix the scorecard. Most owners measure outcomes, deals closed, revenue booked, and then wonder why the number doesn’t move. Hans measures activity instead: calls made, personalized emails sent, mailers dropped, networking events attended. The outcome is what happens when the right activities happen at the right pace. If someone can’t hit the activity numbers, that’s the answer about whether they’re in the right seat.

This is exactly where the Fractional COO role earns its keep. Somebody has to sit close enough to the work to see the difference between a values problem and a scorecard problem, and far enough from the emotion of it to make the call cleanly. Most business owners built their skill in their product or service, not in reading a team, and that gap is exactly where good people quietly slip through the cracks, or bad fits quietly stay too long.

What’s Still on the Client’s Plate

Hans also credits Dan Martell’s book Buy Back Your Time for a habit worth bringing into your own engagements: mapping out what’s below the line, the work that isn’t the owner’s highest and best use, and getting honest about who should own it instead.

Not every client’s first move is hiring an executive assistant, but the exercise of asking the question is worth making non-negotiable in your process. What’s still sitting on a client’s plate that belongs on someone else’s scorecard?

Bring This Into Your Next Client Engagement

Next time a client is circling a people problem without naming it, use Hans’s framework to sort it first: wrong seat or wrong person. If it’s wrong seat, fix the scorecard. If it’s wrong person, give them the one sentence and get out of the way.  If you are struggling with how to support your client through wrong people and/or wrong seat issues, these are the types of mentoring conversations we have in our Connector Member Office Hours.

Listen to the full conversation with Hans Kirkegaard for more, including what it actually looks like to let a top salesperson go when they’re the best performer and the biggest problem in the room at the same time.