We have had an empty Product Development seat on our Accountability Chart for nine months because we cannot find a candidate who fits our core values. My leadership team is exhausted from absorbing the workload, and some want to delete the seat entirely to make the chart look complete. Do we keep the seat empty or remove it?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Deleting a critical seat from your Accountability Chart just to make the chart look complete is a dangerous mistake. It hides the resource gap and leads to organizational self-delusion. If the seat is truly necessary to run the business and hit your V/TO goals, it must remain on the chart as an open, empty seat.

By removing the box, you remove the visibility of the problem. Your team will continue to absorb the extra workload, but without the structural acknowledgment that they are running over capacity. This leads to burnout, dropped balls, and low morale.

Keep the Product Development seat on your Accountability Chart. Below the seat, list the five clear roles that are currently not being fully owned.

In your weekly Level 10 Meetings, the empty seat must remain a topic of discussion under your issues list. You must use IDS to solve the capacity gap.

Identify who is temporarily covering each of the five roles. This makes the shared burden explicit and measurable.

If the hiring bottleneck is because you cannot find a candidate who fits your core values, do not lower your standards. Instead, evaluate your recruiting process. Use Predictive Index to ensure your behavioral job targets are realistic, and keep searching until you find the right person for the seat.