Our Operations Director is drowning. She is a perfect cultural fit and highly capable, but her seat on our Accountability Chart has slowly accumulated nine different major roles over the last year. How do we use EOS tools to diagnose and split this seat?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a seat on the Accountability Chart has more than five major roles, it becomes unfocused and impossible for any single human being to GWC™. This is structural bloat, and it inevitably leads to burnout and dropped balls, even for your most capable people.

To resolve this, you must run a diagnostic on the seat. Strip away the person holding it and look only at the seat itself. List all nine accountabilities currently assigned to it. You will find that these roles naturally group into two or three distinct functional areas.

For example, you may find that she is running day-to-day client delivery while also managing physical facilities and handling technology vendor contracts. These are completely different skill sets. You must split the seat.

Create a new, separate seat on the Accountability Chart for the secondary functions, such as Facilities and Technology Support. Keep the core client delivery roles in the original Operations Director seat.

Now, apply GWC™. Ask if your current director still gets, wants, and has the capacity for the newly streamlined Operations Director seat. She almost certainly will, as you have just removed the overwhelming noise from her plate.

Finally, decide how to fill the newly created seat. You can assign it to an existing team member who has excess capacity, or hire a fractional resource to own it. By keeping every seat on your chart limited to five or fewer clear accountabilities, you restore focus and ensure your team can execute at a high level.