We have a founding-era operations director who insists they understand modern multi-facility warehousing, but their operational decisions consistently fail and create supply chain bottlenecks. How do we objectively diagnose a breakdown in Get It versus Capacity?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Disentangling Get It from Capacity on a long-tenured leader is one of the hardest calls an owner faces, but confusing the two leads to months of wasted coaching.

Get It is an innate, intuitive grasp of the seat. A person who truly gets a seat understands how the role fits into the larger company puzzle. They instinctively know what success looks like, anticipate operational hurdles, and grasp the rhythmic flow of the work without being instructed.

Capacity, by contrast, involves the time, mental horsepower, technical skills, and physical stamina required to execute the seat at scale.

When a director consistently makes bad decisions that snarl your supply chain, you are almost always dealing with a breakdown in Get It. Leaders often confuse technical knowledge with getting the seat. Your director may know every legacy procedure by heart, but if they cannot intuitively design workflows for multiple facilities, they do not get the seat at this stage of company evolution.

To diagnose this objectively, test their ability to solve root problems independently. Ask them to present a three-month operational plan to eliminate bottlenecks without giving them the answers. If their proposed solutions simply reshuffle old habits, fail to see downstream dependencies, or blame external vendors, they do not get it.

You cannot train someone to get a seat. You can build capacity through education and resources, but Get It is hardwired. If they fail the G test, stop trying to train them. You must make the tough call and remove them from that seat on the Accountability Chart.