Our VP of Marketing fits our core values perfectly and gets and wants her seat, but with our rapid expansion into automated, AI-driven digital campaigns, she simply lacks the technical capacity to execute at the level we need. How do we resolve this GWC call when we cannot afford to lose her deep brand knowledge?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic Right Person, Wrong Seat dilemma. Your VP of Marketing is clearly the Right Person because she shares your core values. She Gets it and Wants it, but she lacks the Capacity, which includes the skills, time, and intellectual capability to manage the new, AI-driven technical requirements of the seat.

You cannot leave her in this seat. Keeping someone in a seat they do not fully GWC will lead to poor results, frustration for her, and resentment from the rest of the leadership team. However, because she is a Right Person with valuable institutional knowledge, you should look for a seat on your Accountability Chart that she does GWC.

This might mean restructuring your marketing department. You could split the current seat into two distinct seats: a Brand and Creative Director seat, which she fully GWCs, and a Technical Marketing and Automation seat, which requires a new hire or an external partner.

If there is no seat available in the current structure that she GWCs, you must make the difficult decision to transition her out of the company. It sounds harsh, but keeping her in a seat where she is set up to fail is not doing her any favors, and it puts your exit readiness at serious risk.