Our business grew rapidly from five million to twelve million dollars in revenue, and two long-tenured department heads are suddenly dropping balls and missing targets. How do we diagnose whether the seats have structurally evolved beyond what one person can handle or if our leaders simply lack GWC for their seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a company more than doubles its revenue, the underlying complexity of the business grows exponentially. What worked at five million dollars breaks at twelve million. To solve this, you must run an objective diagnostic that separates seat capacity from individual capability.

First, audit the seats themselves without discussing the individuals. Look at the five core roles written for those seats two years ago. At five million dollars, an Operations Director was likely spending seventy percent of their time doing direct execution and thirty percent managing people. At twelve million dollars, that same seat requires one hundred percent strategic planning, system building, and LMA (Leadership, Management, and Accountability).

If the seat now requires twenty distinct deliverables and directly supervises twelve people, the seat itself is broken. It has accumulated structural bloat. You must split the seat, narrow the five roles, and move execution work beneath them into supervisor or manager seats.

Second, once the seat is right-sized for a twelve-million-dollar company, evaluate the person using GWC. Do they genuinely Get the strategic reality of running a larger department? Do they truly Want the managerial burden, or do they secretly miss being a hands-on technician? Do they have the intellectual and emotional Capacity to lead at this scale?

If the seat is correctly structured and they still drop balls, it is an individual GWC failure, usually around Capacity. If they lack Capacity for the evolved seat, move them into an individual specialist seat where they excel, and hire a seasoned leader who has already operated at your target scale.