You know staffing is not working, but staffing fails at different points, and the fix for a hiring problem is nothing like the fix for a performance problem.
This finds which part is failing and hands you an ordered plan, so you build the piece you actually need instead of everything at once. It is a sorting instrument, not a fix. It will not build your foundation, hire anyone, or fix a performance problem. It is not a review of your current staff, and it is not a place to vent about a difficult person. It is a short, honest read that ends with a written plan, and it takes about ninety minutes. The honesty it asks for is about the part you have been avoiding, which is usually the one that matters most.
A discrimination claim, a firing you are unsure how to do, a wage or classification problem: that is not a diagnostic, it is a call to an employment attorney or an HR professional, now. Then come back to this.
You cannot diagnose staffing from the org chart. You diagnose it from where people actually get stuck, lost, or lost to you. Snapshot the staffing you have, how many, how roles are defined, how hiring happens, what onboarding exists, how performance is handled. Then trace your last few people problems and name where each broke: the role was never clear, the hire was wrong, they were never set up, or expectations were never set.
Open the Staffing Reality Snapshot →Now place your trouble at the failing part, because the part decides the guide. Answer each the way staffing really works.
A leader who has adapted to a broken process stops seeing it as broken. One honest question corrects for that. Ask it of yourself and, separately, of a recent hire and a manager, and compare. Where the honest answer is worse than the rating, trust the honest answer.
Open the Staffing Reality Check →Turn the finding into a plan that names your first guide, what follows, and a start date. Where more than one is true, the order is foundation, then hiring, then onboarding, then performance, because you cannot hire well against roles and pay you have not defined, and you cannot manage performance against expectations you never set.
Open the Staffing Priority Plan →Two moments here call for someone outside these pages. If you are in the middle of an active legal or termination situation, a discrimination claim, a firing you are unsure how to do, a wage or classification problem, that is not a diagnostic, it is a call to an employment attorney or an HR professional, now. And if the diagnostic surfaced that you simply cannot afford the staff the work requires, that is not an HR problem a better process will fix, it is a money and priorities problem, and it goes to the money and financial-health work.
You can say, in one plain sentence, whether your staffing problem is the foundation, hiring, onboarding, or performance. You have a written plan naming a first guide and a date. And you named the part you have been avoiding, which is usually the one that matters most.
Once the acute problem is handled and staffing is steadier, it is worth stepping back to look at the whole organization. There is a short whole-organization check-up waiting when you are ready. That is not a pitch. It is the next honest thing to look at. The whole-organization check-up →