Our long-tenured HR Director is a perfect core values fit and loves her job, but we are scaling fast and the seat now requires sophisticated multi-state compliance and executive recruiting capabilities she simply does not possess. How do we make the GWC call?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is one of the hardest decisions an owner has to make. Your HR Director is a right person because she shares your core values, but she is no longer in the right seat. As your business scales and prepares for an exit, the requirements of the seat have fundamentally changed.

Run a strict GWC evaluation. To get the seat, she must deeply understand the systemic nature of modern compliance and talent acquisition. To want the seat, she must genuinely desire to do that advanced work every day, not just the legacy tasks she is comfortable with. To have the capacity, she must possess the mental, physical, and emotional capability to build and run these complex systems.

If she does not pass all three parts of GWC for the future seat, you have a Right Person, Wrong Seat situation. You cannot keep her in the seat out of loyalty, as this creates a major operational bottleneck and reduces exit value.

Your move is to look at your Accountability Chart and see if there is another seat where she is a perfect GWC fit, perhaps focused on employee experience or culture. If no such seat exists or fits your budget, you must make the hard choice to transition her out of the company. Loyalty means treating her with dignity and offering a generous severance, not keeping her in a seat where she will eventually fail.