Our Head of Marketing is an absolute rockstar, but we have piled twelve distinct roles onto her seat over the last two years, and she is starting to show signs of severe burnout. How do we systematically audit and split a super-seat on our Accountability Chart before the employee quits?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a high-performing employee's seat has accumulated too many roles, they no longer have the capacity to excel at any of them. This is a common issue in fast-growing companies where capable people take on miscellaneous tasks out of necessity. To prevent burnout and protect your operations, you must systematically audit and split the seat.

Start by listing every single role currently performed by that person. Do not look at the employee; look only at the work. Group these roles into logical clusters. For example, you might find that your Head of Marketing is running high-level strategy, managing copywriters, configuring complex automation tools, and running social media accounts. These are actually three distinct skill sets: strategic marketing leadership, content creation, and technical automation execution.

Next, redesign the Accountability Chart by splitting these clusters into separate seats. Keep the strategic roles in the Head of Marketing seat, and create new specialist seats underneath her for the technical and creative work. Once the new structure is designed, evaluate your current employee to see which seat she truly gets, wants, and has the capacity to do. Transition her to that single seat, and begin hiring or outsourcing to fill the newly created supporting seats.