One option: be extremely open to them doing something else at the company. Most people would have to drop acid to hit this level openness. “Put him in marketing? But he’s a software engineer!” Well, apparently he’s not, or least not the kind you want. And don’t half ass it and have them split time or do the old role on the new team. The easiest way would be to look down a list of open jobs and seriously consider them for like 30 seconds each. It’ll be a brutal 10 minutes of focus, but only 10 minutes.

I’ve almost never seen this job switch in a company work, but I’ve almost never seen it attempted. I have seen it work many times between companies. Everyone who switches careers does it.

I think there’s a hang up around “incompetence”. Maybe it’s something inherent to the person, but you don’t have much evidence for that. The evidence is the person/job pair. So, switch up the job if the person seems good.

Sometimes when I’ve struggled with a role that doesn’t feel right and I start blaming myself I think “Not everyone can do this. What if some super smart, healthy, well adjusted person was in this role but was this bad at it. What would he do?” I imagine some baseball player, marketing genius, or renowned writer and that he ended up in this job instead of that one. I guess he’d leave? I’ve actually struggled to come up with an answer but it feels important.