We built our first Accountability Chart and realized that one of our co-founders does not GWC the seat they want to occupy. How do we navigate this conversation without blowing up the partnership?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Discovering that an early partner or co-founder does not GWC their seat is one of the most agonizing moments in an EOS implementation. Usually, the company has outgrown their skill set. They were phenomenal when the business had five employees and required brute force, but at fifty employees, the seat requires strategic leadership that they simply cannot execute.

Owners tend to dance around this reality for years by inventing hybrid seats or dual-reporting structures on the Accountability Chart. This cripples the business and frustrates every employee working beneath them.

You must separate the owner seat from the operating seat. A partner owns equity; that is an investment asset. An operating seat on the Accountability Chart is a job that must be executed daily. Equity does not entitle anyone to hold a seat they cannot GWC.

Address the issue using the definition of GWC: do they Get it, do they Want it, and do they have the Capacity to do it? In most cases involving a tenured partner, the issue is not intelligence; it is Want and Capacity. They are burned out, managing people they do not want to manage, and stressed by scale.

Frame the conversation around their true strengths and the health of the enterprise. Give them the freedom to step into a seat they truly love and excel at, whether that is specialized business development, technical architecture, or stepping back to a board-level role. Freeing them from a seat they cannot fulfill protects both the company value and the partnership.