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S-A-T-P-R: Did Your Broken Process Give Them the Attitude?

ByLew Jaffe

You hired them for their skills. Now they’ve got an attitude problem. So you’re firing them. Did you ever stop to ask — did your broken process give them the attitude?

A coaching client told me last week: “People are the key to the transformation.”

I told her she was 75% right. Here’s what the other 25% looks like.

You hired someone for their skills. Six months in, they’ve got an attitude problem. You’re frustrated. They’re frustrated. You’re already drafting the conversation in your head. But before you have it — ask yourself one question: did your broken process give them the attitude?

The framework

Here’s the framework I walked her through. I call it S-A-T-P-R:

  • S — Skills
  • A — Attitude
  • T — Tools
  • P — Process
  • R — Repeat

The trick isn’t in the letters. It’s in the split. Skills and Attitude belong to the employee. Tools and Process belong to management. Most CEOs evaluate performance as if all four belong to the employee. They don’t.

If you hire a plumber because your toilet is broken — and his boss sends him with a laptop — your toilet isn’t getting fixed. He’ll have great videos to watch. The work won’t get done.

And here’s what happens next: that plumber, who showed up day one ready to do great work, slowly turns into the guy with the attitude problem. Because nobody can stay positive when you’re being asked to do impossible work with the wrong tools.

We do this to our people every day:

  • We hire a salesperson and give them a CRM that doesn’t work.
  • We hire a CFO and give them a system built for a company a third our size.
  • We hire a head of ops and give them spreadsheets instead of an ERP.

Then we blame the person when the output is poor — and when their attitude finally cracks under the weight of trying to win an unwinnable game.

The repeat

The R — Repeat — is the part most frameworks skip. S-A-T-P-R isn’t a one-time diagnostic. It’s a loop. The moment you fix a process, the skill requirement changes. The moment you upgrade a tool, the attitude required to use it shifts. You run it every quarter, on every key role.

The hard truth

Two of the four are management’s responsibility. Most leadership teams only own one of them — if any.

  • If the deficit is in skills → that’s a development decision.
  • If the deficit is in attitude → ask what gave them the attitude before you call it a coaching or exit conversation.
  • If the deficit is in tools → that’s capital. Yours.
  • If the deficit is in process → that’s operations. Yours.

Before you replace the person, audit the system around the person. You may find the problem was never the person.

Same performance problems, different names attached? Book a Capstone Breakthrough Call →

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