We have a critical Quality Assurance and Process Compliance seat on our leadership team that is currently empty because none of our department heads want to own it. How do we handle a vital leadership-level seat that everyone is actively resisting?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a critical seat remains empty because nobody wants it, you have a structural bottleneck that will eventually manifest as a major business predicament. In EOS, every single seat on your Accountability Chart must have one, and only one, owner who completely gets, wants, and has the capacity to do it.

Passing the responsibility around or letting it drift means nobody actually owns it. To resolve this, you must first clarify the exact roles of this Quality Assurance seat. Write down the five major roles that define the seat. Once the roles are clear, run an IDS session with your leadership team to address the resistance.

Often, team members resist a seat because they fear they lack the technical capacity, or because they are already redlined in their current seats. If the resistance is purely a capacity issue, look at outsourcing the function to a specialized fractional vendor, or hire a dedicated mid-level manager to own the seat.

If you must fill it internally for the short term, the Integrator must temporarily take ownership of the seat. The Integrator is ultimately responsible for ensuring all functions of the business are executing. By stepping into the seat temporarily, the Integrator will quickly feel the pain of the gap and be highly motivated to find a permanent, dedicated owner for that seat so the business can continue to run smoothly.