When organizations experience hiring failures, performance problems, or leadership breakdowns, the instinct is to look at the people involved: the wrong hire, the underperforming manager, and the disengaged team. Peter Cyran, a people systems architect who works with organizations to maximize what they already have before recommending anything new, starts with a different question entirely.
“Your people are not ignoring your culture,” Cyran says. “They are responding perfectly rationally to the system you created.” If the system is reinforcing the wrong behaviors, confusion, burnout, churn, that is not a people problem. It is a design problem. The distinction changes everything about where to intervene.
Vibes-Based Hiring Is Why Good Candidates Get Missed
Most hiring processes do not fail because of bad intentions. They fail because nobody agreed on what success looks like before the process started. Every interviewer walks into the room with a different picture of a great candidate. There is no unified scorecard, no agreed-upon signal, and no shared foundation for what the role actually requires. Cyran calls this vibes-based hiring, and it produces exactly the outcomes that frequently surprise organizations.
The fix requires discipline before the first resume is reviewed. Getting the hiring team aligned on the specific behavioral signals that predict success in that role, not pedigree, not impression, but how someone thinks, solves problems, and performs under pressure. When everyone evaluates against the same foundation, two things happen consistently: bias decreases and quality of hire increases. “Not because you found better candidates,” Cyran says, “but because you finally built a process that could recognize them.”
What Your Performance System Is Actually Reinforcing
After a performance review cycle, the most important question is not what ratings were assigned. It is what people walked away believing. Generic feedback disconnected from real goals, reviews clearly designed to protect the organization rather than develop the person, these send a message. At best, the organization is signaling it does not know what it is doing. At worst, the process was never for the employee’s benefit.
“Once people stop believing the system is honest,” Cyran says, “they stop engaging with it.” At that point, the feedback loop is gone entirely, and the organization loses its primary mechanism for understanding what is actually happening at the ground level. The same erosion happens in onboarding. If what is being measured and reinforced in the first 90 days does not match what was communicated during the interview, trust begins breaking before the person has had a chance to fully arrive. The question every people system needs to answer honestly is not what it intends to reward. It is what it is, actually, reinforcing day to day. That answer reveals more than any engagement survey.
Leaders Are the Most Powerful System Signal in Any Organization
Leaders do not set culture in all-hands meetings. They set it in every decision, every tolerance, and every behavior they repeat without realizing it. Cyran identifies what he calls the mold mentality, the leader who, consciously or not, signals that the only acceptable way to work is their way. Think like me, communicate like me, or something is wrong with you.
In practice, this looks like a sales leader insisting cold calling is the only legitimate outbound method, while team members finding success through email, social media, or referrals get labeled as working against expectations, even when they are hitting their numbers. The result is predictable. The highest-potential people either conform or leave. Innovation stalls, diversity of thought disappears, and the leader wonders why growth has plateaued.
“The leaders building high-performing teams are not the ones who need to be the expert in every room,” Cyran says. “They are the ones creating the conditions for their team to be the experts.” When leaders understand that their behavior is the most powerful system signal in the organization, accountability starts feeling fair, expectations become clear, and performance stops depending on heroics.
Better talent decisions do not come from better instincts. They come from better systems, ones that align hiring, performance, and leadership around clear expectations and honest feedback. If something feels broken, the question worth asking is not who is responsible. It is where the organization is still guessing, and what it would actually look like to design that instead.
Follow Peter Cyran on LinkedIn for more insights on people systems design, hiring infrastructure, and building organizations where performance is built in rather than hoped for.
