Two of our senior managers are burning out in their operational roles, and our leadership team wants to solve this by creating new seats on the Accountability Chart like VP of Innovation and Chief Strategy Officer. Why is creating custom seats for tenured leaders a dangerous trap, and how should we handle them instead?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing seats around specific people rather than the actual work needed to run the business is called person-first structuring, and it is a fatal mistake. Creating seats like VP of Innovation or Chief Strategy Officer to accommodate burned-out leaders adds high-cost overhead, blurs operational lines, and creates friction with the functional seats that actually produce revenue and deliver product.

The Accountability Chart must be built structure-first. You only create a seat if the business fundamentally requires those specific five roles to achieve its three-year target.

If a senior manager is burning out in their seat, run the Delegate and Elevate exercise with them. Identify which tasks fall into their Not Good / Love or Not Good / Like quadrants. In most cases, burnout occurs because a seat has grown too large, combining high-level management with frontline technical execution. If the seat is genuinely overloaded, the right structural move is to delegate lower-level responsibilities downward to direct reports, not invent an executive sinecure.

If the manager genuinely lacks the desire or energy for the seat (they no longer Want it), then you must make a clear Right-Seat call. Have an honest conversation about transitioning them into an available seat they truly GWC, or help them transition out of the business cleanly. Inventing vanity seats just to avoid hurting the feelings of long-term employees creates structural confusion that will take years to undo.