During our Accountability Chart session, our leadership team keeps designing seats around our existing executives' personal skill sets instead of what the business requires. How do we force the team to decouple seats from existing personalities?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing an organization around current personalities is the most common and damaging mistake leadership teams make. When you customize an Accountability Chart to accommodate an executive's quirks or preferences, you permanently institutionalize operational bottlenecks and cap your company's growth.

To decouple the seats from personalities, use the blank-slate rule:

- Erase all names from the board. Look strictly at the business model required to reach your goals over the next six to twelve months. Assume none of your current employees work at the company.
- Define the three core functions of the business: sales and marketing, operations, and finance. Add the Integrator and Visionary seats above them if the model requires that structure.
- Identify the five primary roles for each seat. These five roles must represent the essential outcomes that seat must deliver for the business to win. Do not alter a single bullet point to match what someone currently enjoys doing.

Only after the structure is completely finalized and agreed upon by the team do you look at people. You then evaluate candidates using GWC: do they get it, do they want it, and do they have the capacity to do it? If a current executive does not have GWC for the newly defined seat, the seat remains unchanged and you solve the people issue. Never compromise the structure of the business to protect an ego.