Our Director of Engineering has been with us since we were in a garage and has massive historical knowledge, but he clearly does not have the capacity to manage our new twenty-person team or deal with modern agile workflows. He gets the seat and wants the seat, but the capacity is not there. How do we make this GWC call without destroying our company culture or losing his legacy knowledge?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You must separate the human being from the seat. Right now, you are making an emotional decision rather than an operational one. If your Director of Engineering does not have the capacity, he is not a Right Seat fit. Keeping him there is unfair to him and is holding the entire company back.

To resolve this, you need to use the Accountability Chart to find a seat that he actually does GWC. This often means moving him out of the management seat and into an individual contributor or technical advisory seat, such as Principal Architect or Senior Technical Advisor. This allows him to focus on what he does best, which is coding and legacy architecture, while you bring in a true manager who has the cognitive and operational capacity to run the growing engineering department.

Be completely transparent with him. Explain that the company has outgrown the current structure and that his current seat is burning him out. Present the new seat as a way to maximize his unique strengths. If he is a true Core Values fit, he will eventually appreciate the relief of being in a seat where he can succeed. If he refuses to accept a seat that fits his capacity, then he is no longer a Right Person Right Seat fit, and you must make the hard transition for the sake of the business.