Our Operations Manager is an incredible worker, but over the years her seat has bloated to include nine different major roles, ranging from supply chain management to client onboarding and office facilities. She is starting to drop balls because the seat is simply too broad. How do we pare this back to the EOS standard of five core roles?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a seat has more than five core roles, it is no longer a single seat; it is a collection of multiple seats disguised as one. This structural bloat happens slowly as a company grows, and it is a recipe for operational failure. No matter how talented a person is, they cannot maintain focus when they are pulled in too many different directions.

To resolve this, you must look at your Accountability Chart and dissect her current seat. Write down every single role she is currently performing. You will quickly see that these nine roles naturally cluster into two or three distinct operational functions.

Keep the most critical, high-impact roles in her primary seat, ensuring they do not exceed five key accountabilities. These should be the roles that align best with her unique abilities and what she truly wants to do.

Take the remaining roles and build them into new, distinct seats on the chart. For instance, you might pull out facilities management and create a separate Office Coordinator seat. Or you might pull out client onboarding and create a dedicated Client Success seat.

If you do not have the budget to hire new people for these new seats immediately, you can temporarily place other team members' names in those boxes, or even leave them vacant with the Integrator holding ultimate accountability. The critical step is separating the functions on your chart so that you have structural clarity today and a clear hiring plan for tomorrow.