We have a brilliant, tenured employee who has been with us for nine years and knows our systems inside out, but he has grown bored and is threatening to leave. To keep him, my leadership team wants to create a custom Special Projects Director seat on our Accountability Chart tailored specifically to his unique skill set. Why is this a bad idea, and how do we handle this situation without breaking our structure?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Creating custom seats to appease restless employees is one of the most common mistakes business owners make. It violates the core EOS rule of structure before people. When you bend your Accountability Chart to accommodate a specific person's ego or boredom, you create a structural anomaly that will inevitably cause friction, overlapping responsibilities, and confusion for the rest of your team.

If you create a Special Projects Director seat, you will quickly find this person dipping their toes into operations, marketing, and product development. They will bypass your established managers, leading to frustration and dropped balls. When this person eventually leaves, you will be left with an expensive, poorly defined seat that you cannot fill because it was designed for a unicorn.

Instead, you must look at your three-year picture on your V/TO and determine if a Special Projects seat is actually necessary for the business to reach its goals. If the business does not need that seat to function and scale, do not create it.

Have a direct, open and honest conversation with this employee. Explain that you build the structure to serve the company's vision, not individual preferences. Find out what they actually want. If there is a legitimate, vacant seat on your forward-looking Accountability Chart that they have the GWC for, transition them into it. If their career desires have outgrown what your business genuinely needs, you must let them move on with your blessing. It is painful to lose a long-term employee, but it is far less painful than ruining your organizational structure to keep them.