Before You Call It a People Problem, Look at the Whole System
What the Galbraith Star Model can teach us about diagnosing performance problems before we prescribe another training.
When an organizational problem has a face, we tend to blame the face.
A team misses deadlines, so the team must lack accountability. Managers are struggling, so they need leadership training. Employees are overwhelmed, so they need to manage their time better. A department is not performing, so perhaps the people simply are not capable enough.
People become the easiest explanation because people are the most visible part of the problem.
But visible is not the same as causal.
Recently, I heard someone describe an entire department as incompetent. The team had been receiving more training, but their feedback was consistent: they were overwhelmed by the volume of information and the number of things they were expected to do.
The response was essentially: The same setup worked at another company. Those people handled it just fine.
And there is the trap.
It may look like the same setup on an org chart, but it is not the same organization. The strategy is different. The workflows are different. The technology, decision-making, leadership habits, competing priorities, customer demands, staffing levels, and unwritten expectations are different.
You cannot lift one piece of an organization out of its environment, place it somewhere new, and assume it will behave the same way.
Organizations are systems. And systems have a pesky habit of producing exactly the outcomes they are designed to produce… even when those outcomes are not the ones leaders intended.
A star-shaped reminder to zoom out
Jay Galbraith’s Star Model offers a useful way to look beyond the person standing closest to the problem. The model asks leaders to consider five connected parts of organizational design:
Strategy: What are we trying to accomplish, and what choices or tradeoffs have we made?
Structure: How are responsibilities, authority, and resources distributed?
Processes: How does work actually move, including information, decisions, and handoffs?
Rewards: What gets measured, recognized, reinforced, or quietly punished?
People: Do we have the capacity, capabilities, support, and talent practices the work requires?
The value of the model is not that every problem fits neatly into five labeled points. Organizations rarely cooperate that nicely.
Its value is the reminder that no point operates alone.
Change one, and you create pressure on the others. Leave them misaligned, and people are forced to compensate for the gaps.
Often, what leaders label a people problem is actually the place where the rest of the system has become visible.
What “overwhelmed” might actually be telling you
Let’s return to that overwhelmed team.
If we decide the problem is capability, the obvious response is more training. But training only addresses part of the people point, and even there, it addresses skill more than capacity.
Zoom out, and different possibilities emerge:
The strategy may contain too many priorities with no meaningful tradeoffs.
The structure may place too much responsibility with too few people or leave ownership unclear.
The processes may bury the team in approvals, interruptions, duplicate work, or broken handoffs.
The rewards may encourage people to say yes to every request, respond to the loudest stakeholder, or optimize speed at the expense of quality.
The people practices may provide training without the time, reinforcement, staffing, or manager support required to use it.
Same symptom. Five very different places to investigate.
And most likely, the real answer lives in the interaction among several of them.
That is why more training can make an overwhelmed team feel even more overwhelmed. The organization has added another demand without changing the conditions producing the strain.
The weird stuff is data
Whole-system diagnosis does not always begin with a giant transformation initiative. It often begins by getting curious about the things people have learned to dismiss.
The workaround everyone uses because the official process takes too long.
The manager who must approve decisions they do not have enough context to make.
The value that says “collaboration” while individual incentives reward territorial behavior.
The team that keeps requesting clearer priorities and keeps receiving another productivity tool.
The customer complaint that repeatedly gets solved at the front line but never traced back to the internal handoff creating it.
This is the weird stuff. And the weird stuff is data.
Each example tells us something about how the system is actually operating, not how the process map says it operates or how leaders believe it operates.
Culture lives here, too. It is not floating separately above the organization as a set of values or vibes. Culture is reinforced through what the strategy prioritizes, what the structure makes possible, how decisions get made, what gets rewarded, and what people must do to succeed.
If employees routinely work around a process to serve customers well, that workaround is both an operational signal and a cultural one. It may reveal commitment and ingenuity. It may also reveal that the organization depends on heroics to deliver its promise.
Both can be true.
Diagnose the conditions, not the character
Looking at the whole system does not mean people are never part of the problem.
Sometimes expectations have been clear, the role is reasonably designed, support has been provided, and performance still does not meet the need. Capability and accountability matter.
But “the people are the problem” should be a conclusion reached through diagnosis, not the assumption that begins it.
Before prescribing a solution, ask:
What outcome are we seeing, and what evidence do we have? Separate observable patterns from character judgments like lazy, resistant, or incompetent.
What conditions make this outcome more likely? Look across strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people.
Where are people compensating for the system? Workarounds, repeated escalations, invisible coordination, and heroic effort are useful clues.
What does the system make easy? Organizations can say one thing matters while making something entirely different easier, safer, or more rewarding.
What else might our proposed solution add? A new training, tool, meeting, or approval step may create more load if something else is not removed or redesigned.
These questions slow down the rush to judgment just enough to improve the quality of action.
That is not softness. It is rigor.
People experience the system, and reveal it
One of the most important ideas in organizational development is also one of the simplest: behavior happens in context.
People are not separate from the organization around them. They respond to its signals, incentives, constraints, norms, relationships, and contradictions. Over time, they also shape those conditions for one another.
That means employee experience is not created by an engagement initiative alone. Customer experience is not created by the customer-facing team alone. Culture is not created by a values workshop alone.
Experience is created by the system.
So the next time a team is labeled resistant, overwhelmed, disengaged, or incapable, resist the tidy answer. Look at the work around the people. Look at what leaders are asking for, what the organization is rewarding, where decisions stall, how information travels, and what employees have to work around to get something done.
The pattern is already there.
You just have to zoom out far enough to see it.
Something feels harder than it should? CulturePop helps leaders find the patterns behind organizational friction and turn that clarity into aligned action.
