We brought in an outside Vice President of Sales who looked perfect on paper, but after six months they completely failed to deliver results. How do we diagnose whether we had the wrong person in the seat or designed an impossible seat on the Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a high-profile executive hire fails quickly, leadership teams usually assume they picked the wrong person. While hiring mistakes happen, failures in executive seats are just as often structural. You must isolate whether the issue was the person or the seat definition on your Accountability Chart.

Start by evaluating the person using the People Analyzer®. Did they display your Core Values consistently? Did they truly GWC™ the seat? If they lacked cultural alignment or clearly did not understand how to execute the role in your specific industry, you had a Right Person, Wrong Seat or Wrong Person issue.

If the person passed the People Analyzer, look squarely at your seat architecture. A poorly designed seat sets even brilliant executives up to fail. Ask these diagnostic questions:
- Did the seat have more than five core roles, creating impossible, conflicting priorities?
- Did the seat combine incompatible functions, such as demanding high-volume outbound prospecting while simultaneously managing enterprise account management?
- Did the new hire possess true decision-making authority, or did the Visionary or Integrator continually undermine their choices?
- Were the seat measurables realistic and supported by functioning operational processes?

If you discover that the seat required three people's worth of bandwidth or lacked clear authority, redrawing the box on your Accountability Chart must happen before you spend another dollar recruiting a replacement. Redefine the seat, clarify the reporting structure, and then re-enter the market.