Our leadership team has been together for seven years, and we are struggling to design our new Accountability Chart because we keep trying to fit the boxes around the unique talents and quirks of our existing staff. How do we break this habit and enforce the structure before people rule?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing your Accountability Chart around your existing people is the fastest way to build a fragile, unscalable business that buyers will avoid. When you customize seats for specific personalities, you create a complex web of dependencies that collapses the moment a key employee leaves. To break this habit, you must mentally fire everyone in your company. Clear all the names off your current organizational chart. Now, look only at your business model, your targets on the V/TO, and your operational requirements. Ask yourself what seats must exist to run this business effectively if you had to start from scratch today. Define the five major roles for each seat without discussing who might fill them. Only after the structure is completely finalized and agreed upon by the leadership team do you begin putting names into the boxes. When you run into a conflict where a loyal, long-term employee does not fit cleanly into a newly defined seat, you must address it as a Right Person, Right Seat issue. You may need to train them, find another seat where they do GWC the roles, or accept that the business has outgrown their current capabilities. Prioritizing structure before people is hard, but it is the only way to build a self-sustaining asset.