A conversation with Dustin Snyder, author of Sink or Swim, on why behavior at scale is never random, what a $300,000 consulting report taught him about the industry, and the small thing a rural energy company was hiding that turned out to be their greatest competitive advantage.
The Moment the Playbook Stopped Working
Dustin Snyder came up through HR. He knows the toolkit well, the progressive discipline process, the engagement surveys, the performance improvement plans, the carefully documented paper trail designed to protect the organization from liability. He used all of it for years. And somewhere along the way, sitting in the corner office of a struggling 600-person manufacturing division he’d been asked to turn around, he had a realization that changed how he thought about almost everything.
“I looked at the HR toolkit that I had been trained with,” he told me, “and I realized that we have this progressive discipline process that never in my career actually resulted in behavioral change. It’s meant to limit liability. It’s meant to document the situation so we don’t have a wrongful termination suit.” He looked at the rest of the toolkit and saw the same thing. “This whole thing is designed to limit liability. It’s not actually designed to change how our people are behaving at all.”
That recognition sent him somewhere most HR leaders don’t go: into systems thinking. If the standard tools weren’t producing behavioral change, maybe behavioral change wasn’t really the goal they were designed for. And if you actually wanted to change behavior at scale, you had to start asking a different question: Not what’s wrong with these people, but what is the environment doing to produce this outcome?
Why Behavior at Scale Is a System Output
The framework Dustin eventually built, grounded in clinical psychology, family systems theory, organizational psychology, and behavioral economics, goes by the name Human Systems Theory. The core premise is simple enough to state but genuinely difficult to internalize: when you see a behavior happening across a significant portion of your workforce, it is a rational adaptation to the environment. A character flaw doesn’t explain it. A hiring problem doesn’t either. It’s a logical response to the inputs people are living inside of every day.
“We don’t hire 20% bad apples,” he said. “That just doesn’t math.” When absenteeism is systemic, when turnover is chronic, when teams won’t engage with a new strategy no matter how many times leadership explains it, the behavior is telling you something about the conditions, not the people. “If this is a rational behavioral outcome for a significant portion of the workforce, what is driving it? There’s a root cause that is actually driving the behavior. And if we stop fighting the symptoms and start looking for the rational input producing this output, we’re able to cut things off a lot sooner.”
He tested this intuitively before he understood the science behind it. At that manufacturing company, he started asking himself a simple question: if I were in their shoes, would I be behaving the same way? The answer, more often than he expected, was yes. He thought about the times he personally hadn’t wanted to come to work. A decision made without his input. A project gutted by someone above him. When he laid those reasons out honestly, they weren’t meaningfully different from what his workforce was likely experiencing. That small shift in perspective unlocked something. Once he started treating employee behavior as a rational response rather than a disciplinary problem, people started talking to him, and things changed fast.
What a $300,000 Consulting Report Got Wrong
When Dustin took over the role of president at that manufacturing division, one of the first things he found in the files was an 80-page report from one of the Big Four consulting firms. He read the whole thing. The conclusion, after what turned out to be a $300,000 engagement, was essentially: yes, the problem you hired us to examine does exist. But there was no root cause, no recommendations, and no path forward.
“I said to myself when I started consulting, I am never going to do that,” he told me. The experience shaped everything about how he designed his own methodology, which he calls SWIM: Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping. Whereas conventional engagement surveys ask leadership’s questions and surface symptoms that organizations usually already know about, SWIM uses psychodynamic interviewing to get at the deeper beliefs, experiences, and patterns that explain why the symptoms exist in the first place.
The UPS example he cites in the book makes the flaw in standard surveys concrete. One year, the company recorded some of its best employee engagement results ever. A few months later, there was a company-wide strike. The survey hadn’t asked about the thing that mattered most to the workforce. It couldn’t, because the questions were designed by people who didn’t yet know what that thing was. That’s the structural limitation Dustin is working around. “You’re asking about a specific set of topics, and you may be missing things, not asking about what’s most important to the employees in the first place.”
Why Skilled Trades Turnover Is Rarely About Pay
One of the clearest illustrations of SWIM in action came from a manufacturing company hemorrhaging skilled tradespeople. Leadership assumed the problem was compensation. Maybe schedule flexibility. They were competing against larger companies with deeper pockets and figured they were simply losing on salary.
What the SWIM process revealed was something else entirely. The company’s chief operating officer genuinely wanted a first-time-right, fix-the-root-cause approach to maintenance. But in the field, certain supervisors and salespeople were pushing quick fixes instead, band-aids and workarounds that had skilled tradespeople repeating the same repairs on the same equipment over and over. These were people who cared deeply about their craft. Being forced to do shoddy work made them feel like failures. “They didn’t want more pay,” Dustin said. “They wanted to be able to do things in a way that they were proud of,” which was exactly what the COO wanted them to do.
The two parties were aligned. They just couldn’t see each other. Some targeted clarification to the right stakeholders, a relatively inexpensive fix, was enough to close the gap. Three years later, the company hasn’t lost a single skilled tradesperson.
The Employer Brand Hidden in Plain Sight
The energy company story is different in kind but similar in structure. A mid-sized company in a rural area couldn’t recruit experienced engineers and assumed the problem was obvious: they weren’t in a major metro, they couldn’t match the salaries of the large multinationals, and nobody would want to come to the middle of nowhere when they could be in Chicago or New York.
When Dustin sat down with the engineers who were already there, he found people who had worked for exactly those large multinationals and left deliberately. They were ten years into their careers, settling down, starting families. They had done the intense travel and the impossible schedules and the six-figure salaries that didn’t stretch as far as anyone thought in an expensive city. What they wanted now was to be home for dinner, to make their kids’ baseball games, to afford a house with a yard, to have a schedule that didn’t swallow their lives.
“You’ve been downplaying and hiding all of this because you thought it was a disadvantage,” Dustin told the company. “Stop hiding this. Lean into this. Make this your value proposition.” They were offering, without realizing it, exactly what their ideal candidate was looking for. They just hadn’t said so. Once they did, the recruiting problem went away.
The Real Cost of Employee Turnover Your Accounting Misses
One of the more practically important arguments in the book is about how organizations measure, or consistently fail to measure, the actual financial impact of workforce problems. Accounting captures transactions. Payroll captures what you pay people. What it doesn’t capture is what people produce, and the gap between those two numbers is where most of the real cost lives.
Dustin’s benchmark is that a well-positioned hire should generate somewhere around three to four times their salary in value. A $100,000 employee generating $100,000 in value isn’t a good investment. The investment only makes sense if the return is meaningfully larger. When someone leaves, or calls out, or disengages, the financial impact isn’t captured in the payroll line. It shows up in missed production, in work redistributed to people already stretched, in colleagues who start updating their resumes because the environment has gotten harder. None of that appears in the accounting. Which means organizations routinely underestimate how much their workforce problems are actually costing them, and underinvest accordingly in fixing the root causes.
Triangulation. Why HR Becomes the Third Point
The concept from family systems theory that Dustin finds most relevant to organizational life is triangulation. When two people in a relationship carry more anxiety than they can sustain together, one of them will loop in a third person connected to both. The original tension gets vented into this new triangle, which means the two people with the actual problem stop working on it. The problem persists, sometimes grows, and the organization develops workarounds that mistake managed dysfunction for resolution.
HR, in his observation, becomes the third point of that triangle constantly. Leaders bring their people problems to HR instead of addressing them directly. Peers vent to each other about a colleague instead of giving that colleague feedback. The CHRO and CFO discuss concerns about a CEO decision with each other instead of raising them with the CEO. Everyone feels heard, but nothing changes. “These two people are now discussing the third person or discussing the issue, and the original two people who have the issue are no longer dealing with it.”
The Bottom Line
What Dustin keeps coming back to is a mindset shift that doesn’t require hiring a consultant or buying a methodology. When you see a behavioral pattern across a significant portion of your workforce, stop asking what’s wrong with these people and start asking what would have to be true about the environment for this behavior to be rational. That question usually leads somewhere useful. “If more HR leaders can start to shift their thinking this way and take a systems thinking approach when it comes to human behavior in their organization,” he said, “they will start to do the right things.”
Leaders who understand the distinction between control and design, who realize they can shape the inputs rather than fight the outputs, stop spinning their wheels and start making changes that actually stick.
Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace and the VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR, an outsourced HR and payroll partner for small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon.