We are restructuring our organization and trying to build our Accountability Chart, but we keep getting stuck because we are designing seats around our existing, loyal team members rather than what the business actually needs. How do we detach our people from our structure to design the ideal future chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing your Accountability Chart around current employees is the fastest way to build a broken company. When you build seats to accommodate the unique quirks, limitations, or tenure of specific individuals, you compromise the company's growth. To fix this, you must run an exercise where you completely ignore your current staff. Imagine you have sold the business and must hand over a perfectly functioning organization to a buyer, or imagine you are building the company from scratch with an unlimited hiring budget.

Ask what major functions must exist to run the business at its next stage of evolution. For most companies, this starts with the three major functions of Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance, led by an Integrator and supported by a Visionary. Define the ideal seats first. For each seat, list the five major roles and responsibilities that must be owned for that seat to succeed.

Only after the structure is completely finalized and agreed upon by the leadership team do you look at your actual people. Evaluate every person against the newly designed seats using the GWC™ framework: do they Get it, do they Want it, and do they have the Capacity to do it? If a loyal employee does not fit any of the new seats, you must face that hard truth. You can try to find them another seat where they do fit, but you must never bend the structural seat to fit the person. Keep the structure pure, or you will fail to scale.