My leadership team agrees on Get It and Want It for our customer service manager, but we are stuck on Capacity because she is working eighty hours a week and still falling behind. Is this a capacity issue of the seat itself, or does she lack the capacity as an individual?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To resolve this, you must run a diagnostic check. You need to separate the capacity of the seat from the capability of the person sitting in it. If a seat requires eighty hours of work to complete baseline tasks, you have a structural problem on your Accountability Chart, not a performance issue.

Start by performing a time study. Have your customer service manager log her daily activities for two weeks. Analyze this data to see where her time is actually going. Are her hours spent on high-value leadership activities, or is she bogged down in manual, administrative tasks that could be automated or delegated?

If the workload is truly too large for one person, the seat must be split. You cannot expect anyone to succeed in a structurally flawed seat.

However, if the workload is reasonable but she is struggling because of poor time management, lack of delegation, or lack of technical skills, then she lacks the personal capacity for the seat. In this scenario, she is a Right Person in the Wrong Seat.

Use Keith Cunningham's Thinking Time framework to ask: How might we restructure this department so that she can focus solely on what she does best? If you find she cannot manage the team size or lacks the conative follow-through to build scalable systems, you must move her to a specialized individual contributor seat and bring in a leader who GWCs the management seat.