We are scaling fast and our leadership team wants to add three new mid-management seats to the Accountability Chart to handle the workload. How do we determine if we genuinely need new seats or if our current leaders are simply failing to delegate and elevate?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Before you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new salaries and add layers of complexity to your organization, you must test whether your current leaders are operating at their highest and best use.

Start by having each leader run the delegate and elevate exercise. They must write down every single task they perform during the week and place them into four quadrants: love doing and great at, like doing and good at, don't like but good at, and don't like and not good at.

In almost every case, you will find that your leaders are holding onto low-value, tactical tasks in the bottom two quadrants because they suffer from control issues or lack documented standard operating procedures. If they are spending twenty hours a week on bookkeeping, client onboarding, or manual data entry, they do not need a new manager seat. They need to delegate those tactical tasks to existing junior team members or automate them.

Only add a new seat to the Accountability Chart when your leaders have completely cleared their plates of lower-value work and are still maxed out on high-level strategic execution. If you add seats before solving the delegation bottleneck, you are simply institutionalizing inefficiency and creating structural bloat that will hurt your margins and lower your exit valuation.