We are designing our Accountability Chart for the first time, but my three original employees have highly unique, overlapping skill sets that do not fit into standard departments. I want to build our seats around their specific talents so I do not risk losing them. How do we apply the structure before people rule when our legacy employees are so highly specialized?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Building your Accountability Chart around the people you currently have is a classic trap that guarantees organizational stagnation. When you customize seats to fit unique, overlapping individual talents, you are coding your current operational inefficiencies directly into your future business structure. This prevents scale and makes your business highly vulnerable to key-person risk, which is a major red flag for potential buyers looking for a clean exit.

To break this habit, you must mentally empty all the seats on your current team. Force your leadership team to design the ideal future structure of the organization six to twelve months out, focusing purely on what the business requires to achieve its goals as outlined in your V/TO®. Define the major functions needed, such as Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Integrator, and determine the exactly five major roles for each seat.

Only after you have established the objective, person-free Accountability Chart do you begin looking at your existing team members. Use the GWC™ framework to evaluate them against the newly designed seats. Ask yourself if they truly get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it. If a legacy employee does not cleanly fit into one of the new, standardized seats, you must either find a different seat where they do GWC™ the role or accept that they may have outgrown the organization. Protecting their comfort at the expense of your structure will only stall your business.