We are designing our Accountability Chart for our three-year target to prepare for an exit, but our current leadership team is struggling to separate their current day-to-day tasks from the future seats we need to build. They keep trying to fit their existing jobs into the future chart. How do we get them to think structurally instead of personally?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To build an exit-ready organization, you must design the structure for the business, not the people you currently have. When leadership teams build an Accountability Chart, their natural bias is to protect their own jobs and titles, which results in a messy, inefficient structure that mirrors your current operational bottlenecks.

To break this habit, you must run the Accountability Chart exercise with one strict rule: remove all names from the board entirely. You are not allowed to discuss who will sit in which seat until the entire structural chart is finalized.

Force your team to focus solely on what the business needs to hit its three-year target and prepare for a clean exit. Ask questions like: If we were starting this company from scratch today to achieve this target, what seats would we absolutely need to have? What are the five major accountabilities for each of those seats?

Only after the ideal, name-free structure is built and agreed upon do you begin the process of putting names into seats. Run every team member through the GWC™ check for the new seats.

This approach neutralizes politics and defensiveness. If a long-time manager does not GWC™ a newly defined seat required for your future growth, it becomes an objective business issue to solve rather than a personal attack. This discipline ensures you build a scalable superstructure that potential buyers will recognize as a mature, self-sustaining business.