Our leadership team is struggling to decouple our current staff members from the design of our Accountability Chart, resulting in seats built around people rather than functions. How do we force ourselves to design the chart for the business we need in twelve months?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing an Accountability Chart around your current people is a fatal mistake that locks in your existing organizational bottlenecks. It limits your growth to the capabilities of your current team.

To break this cycle, you must practice mental empty-boxing during your design sessions. Imagine you have zero employees and are building a business from scratch to hit your three-year target.

Ask yourself what functions are absolutely required to hit that revenue and operational goal. Define the five major responsibilities for each seat first, without putting any names in those boxes. Only after the structure is fully optimized do you begin looking at your people to see if they get, want, and have the capacity to do the job.

If a valued employee does not fit any of the newly designed seats, you must have the courage to address the gap rather than bending the chart to fit their specific skillset. The chart must serve the business, not the people.