You Saw the Red Flags — Here’s How to Fix Them

In the recent post, we laid out five persistent issues that frustrate leaders and quietly erode organisational performance. Here’s the follow-up: what to do if these problems are present in your business.

These aren’t silver bullets, but they are practical, proven steps that shift the dial.

1. Ill-defined jobs: clarify, codify, and communicate

Solution: Start with a role audit. Map actual work against job descriptions. Where there’s ambiguity, rewrite. Where there’s overlap, restructure. Then communicate clearly, internally and externally.

Action plan:

• Use working sessions with teams to define what success looks like in each role.
• Build role scorecards with outcomes, not just tasks.
• Ensure job descriptions are aligned with business priorities, not legacy structures.

2. Managers with low standards: reset expectations and build capability

Solution: Performance management is a skill, not a personality trait. Train managers to set expectations, give feedback, and coach. If they can’t or won’t, move them out of management.

Action plan:

• Introduce a simple performance framework: expectations, feedback, development.
• Run targeted manager capability programs focused on real-world scenarios.
• Make performance conversations part of the rhythm, not a once-a-year event.

3. Weak candidate pipelines: build before you need

Solution: Treat talent acquisition like sales. Build relationships, nurture leads, and keep the funnel warm. Use data to track pipeline health and act before it’s urgent.

Action plan:

• Create a passive candidate engagement strategy, content, events, outreach.
• Partner with hiring managers to forecast needs 6–12 months out.
• Invest in tools that give visibility into pipeline strength and gaps.

4. Cultures that tolerate ‘average’: raise the bar and reward excellence

Solution: Culture is what you tolerate. If you want high performance, you have to challenge norms, celebrate excellence, and make mediocrity uncomfortable.

Action plan:

• Define what “great” looks like in your context and talk about it often.
• Use peer recognition to spotlight high standards.
• Address underperformance quickly and visibly.

5. HR’s inability to drive change: reframe the function

Solution: HR needs to be embedded in the business, not adjacent to it. That means hiring for commercial acumen, building change capability, and aligning HR metrics to business outcomes.

Action plan:

• Shift HR’s focus from policy to impact: what’s the business problem, and how do we solve it?
• Build cross-functional teams for change initiatives, with HR as a core driver.
• Measure HR success in terms of business metrics, growth, retention, productivity.

In Summary

As W. Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Fixing these issues isn’t about heroics, it’s about building systems that enable people to perform.

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Justin Miles

Manager Partner, Melbourne at Generator Talent

Justin is the Managing Partner of our Melbourne office, an outcome focused leader with a track record of driving business performance through proven talent and organisation development practices. Justin’s methods and skills have been shaped by working with performance oriented leaders in great companies including PepsiCo, The Campbell Soup Company, Diageo, Rip Curl, Fonterra and Wesfarmers, in Australia, the USA and Latin America.