We are designing our Accountability Chart to support our three-year growth target, but we keep getting stuck because our current leadership team members do not have the skills to run the larger, future-state seats. How do we design this future structure without letting our loyalty to existing people cloud our judgment?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You must run a clean exercise of structure before people. When you look at your current staff, you naturally design seats to fit their specific comfort zones and limitations, which guarantees you will stay stuck at your current size. To break this habit, take a blank whiteboard and completely forget who currently works for you. Start by designing the three core operational seats: Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance, led by an Integrator, with a Visionary if applicable. Define the five major roles for each of those seats based on what the company needs to hit its three-year target, not what your current managers are capable of doing. Once the ideal structure is locked in, only then do you write your current employees names next to the seats and run the GWC check. Some of your legacy leaders will fit the new, elevated seats perfectly. Others will fit smaller seats that report to those elevated seats. A few may not fit the future structure at all. This is where your loyalty must shift from protecting individuals to protecting the health of the entire organization. If you build a structure around people, you build a fragile organization. If you build a structure first and then find or train the right people to sit in those seats, you build an enterprise that can scale predictably.