We have a seat on our Accountability Chart titled Special Projects that exists purely because a long-time employee has a unique set of disconnected skills that do not fit into Marketing, Sales, or Operations. How do we eliminate custom-built seats without alienating a valued contributor?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Custom-built seats are organizational deadweight. They occur when owners build the structure around existing people rather than building the structure around what the business needs to function and scale.

Having a vague Special Projects seat creates confusion across the leadership team. Other leaders do not know what the seat produces, who directs the work, or how to measure success on the Scorecard. When prospective buyers examine an Accountability Chart full of bespoke catch-all roles, they see high key-person risk and operational disorganization.

To eliminate this seat, dispassionately dissect the employee's current daily workload. Break their responsibilities into distinct functional tasks and assign each task to the true department seat where it naturally belongs, whether that is Sales, Marketing, Operations, or Finance.

Once the tasks are reassigned to their proper seats, look at the employee using the People Analyzer and GWC. Determine if there is a real, necessary seat on your new Accountability Chart where this individual can deliver focused, full-time value.

If a legitimate seat exists, place them in it and establish clear measurables. If their skill set is so scattered that they cannot fulfill five coherent roles in a single real seat, you must restructure their relationship with the business. That may mean shifting them to a specialized contractor role or parting ways cleanly.