Our Vice President of Operations has been with us for fourteen years, bleeds our core values, and works sixty hours a week, but he fundamentally does not Get modern systemized operations. How do we objectively call a GWC failure on a beloved veteran who wants the job and has the energy?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is the classic Right Person, Wrong Seat trap. Your veteran is a cultural anchor, but loyalty cannot compensate for an inability to understand the seat. In EOS®, GWC™ stands for Gets it, Wants it, and has the Capacity to do it. You must evaluate all three independently.

Getting it is intellectual and instinctual. It means a leader naturally understands the pace, systems, mechanics, and mental models required to execute the five roles of that seat at your current scale. Working sixty hours a week proves Want and physical stamina, but excessive hours are often masking a deficit in Get. When a leader does not Get their seat, they compensate with raw hustle, which creates bottlenecks, micromanagement, and operational drag.

Take the emotion out of the room by using the People Analyzer®. Evaluate your leader against your core values first. If he is at or above the bar on values, he is the Right Person. Next, evaluate GWC for the Operations seat as it must exist over the next twelve months to hit your V/TO®. If he gets a minus on Get, you must be honest. You cannot teach someone to Get a seat at this level; that wiring is either there or it is not.

Your responsibility as the leadership team is to protect the organization. Having a minus on Get in a major seat threatens every employee in the company. Have a candid, caring conversation. Explain that the company has scaled into a new operational complexity. Transition him out of the leadership Operations seat into a specialized seat where his deep institutional knowledge adds enterprise value without requiring him to architect scalable systems. If no such seat exists, help him transition out of the business with dignity. Never leave a minus in a leadership seat out of sentimentality.