Our long-tenured Customer Service Director is a perfect core values fit and wants to lead our new AI-driven support department, but he clearly lacks the technical capacity to build and manage these automated workflows. How do we make this GWC™ call when his seat requires scaling for our exit?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic Right Person, Wrong Seat dilemma. Your Customer Service Director represents your culture and has deep institutional knowledge, but as you prepare the business for an exit, the requirements of his seat have fundamentally changed.

The GWC™ tool is binary: Get it, Want it, and Capacity to do it. While he gets the culture and wants the job, capacity is not just about time. It is about intellectual, emotional, and physical capability to perform the specific roles defined for that seat. If his seat now requires designing, troubleshooting, and managing complex AI driven customer service workflows, and he does not possess those skills, he does not GWC the seat.

Keeping him in a seat he does not GWC will frustrate him, bottleneck your technology scaling, and hurt your exit valuation. You must design the future ready seat on your Accountability Chart first, completely independent of his current tenure. Once the seat is defined, evaluate him honestly. Since he is a Right Person, you should look for another seat on the Accountability Chart where he does GWC the roles, perhaps in a client relations or relationship driven seat. If no such seat exists or can be created profitably, you must make the hard call to transition him out of the organization so you can fill the seat with someone who can scale the operations.