We created a Director of Special Projects seat on our Accountability Chart for a high-performing leader, but it has turned into a dumping ground for undefined tasks and confuses our leadership team. How do we dismantle this catch-all seat?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Creating vague titles like Director of Special Projects is a common structural error. It usually happens when an owner wants to retain a talented individual but cannot define an actual operational seat, or wants an ad-hoc problem solver on call.

Catch-all seats create immediate organizational friction. They break lane discipline, blur accountability, and bypass functional managers. When priorities get tough, other department heads offload messy problems to the special projects leader instead of solving them in their own Level 10 Meeting. Furthermore, team members get confused about who possesses real decision authority.

To eliminate this issue, dismantle the seat using pure structure-first principles. Look at your Accountability Chart and examine the work currently sitting on that leader plate. Sort their current responsibilities into their true functional homes: Sales, Marketing, Operations, Finance, or Human Resources.

If a special project involves automating customer onboarding, that belongs under Operations. If it involves launching a new service line, it belongs under Sales or Product. Every legitimate business activity has a natural functional owner. If an activity does not belong in one of the major seats, ask whether the business should be doing it at all.

Once the tasks are reassigned to their proper seats, evaluate the leader. Look at the open seats on your future-looking Accountability Chart. Where do their core values and GWC truly fit? Place them into a real seat with five clearly defined roles and hard metrics. If there is no real seat that matches their skills and the company needs, do not invent another fake title. An unassigned superstar without a defined seat only generates operational noise.