When promoting internally, how do we distinguish between an employee who has simply demonstrated deep loyalty and technical excellence versus someone who genuinely possesses the strategic capacity to sit on the executive team?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Loyalty and technical brilliance are backward-looking metrics. They prove what an employee achieved in the past within a narrower scope of responsibility. Executive capacity is forward-looking. It requires the ability to see the entire enterprise through the lens of the V/TO®, make hard trade-offs that hurt their own department for the greater good of the company, and manage other leaders rather than doing the work themselves.

To evaluate whether a loyal individual contributor or manager can sit at the leadership table, evaluate them strictly through GWC™.

First, do they get it? Getting it means having an innate, intuitive understanding of the role at scale. A great engineer often understands the codebase, but an executive gets how technology integrates with sales, finance, and operations to generate cash flow.

Second, do they want it? Many loyal performers say yes to leadership roles purely out of ambition, ego, or fear of disappointing you. They want the compensation and status, but they despise managing personnel issues, attending Level 10 Meetings, and owning quarterly Rocks that cross functional boundaries.

Third, do they have the capacity to do it? Capacity includes emotional maturity, strategic intellectual bandwidth, and the discipline to delegate.

Before granting an executive seat, test their capacity in advance. Assign them a cross-functional Rock or have them lead a complex operational initiative requiring peer collaboration. If they focus solely on their individual domain or struggle to lead through influence, they are a high-value specialist, not a leadership team member. Build an advanced specialist seat on the Accountability Chart so you can reward their loyalty without crippling your executive team.