Our VP of Operations has been with us since the early days, but as we scale toward our target exit valuation, they are clearly hitting their personal ceiling and cannot keep up with the complexity of our growing business. How do we address this capability gap without looking disloyal to the rest of our legacy employees?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your business scales, the seats on your Accountability Chart must scale too. A leader who was world-class when you were a five million dollar company might find themselves completely overwhelmed at fifteen million dollars. This is not a personal failure, it is a business reality.

To handle this capability gap without destroying legacy morale, you must separate the person from the seat. Use the GWC tool, which stands for Get it, Want it, and Capacity to do it. Be brutally honest about whether this leader has the mental, physical, and emotional capacity to manage the increased complexity of the seat as you prepare for an exit.

If they do not GWC the seat, you have a duty to the company to find someone who does. However, your loyalty to the person does not have to mean keeping them in a role where they are failing. Your goal is to keep great people who share your core values by finding or creating a seat they actually GWC.

Have a transparent, face-to-face conversation. Explain that the seat has outgrown their current capacity and that keeping them there is setting them up to fail. Work together to identify a different seat in the organization where they can thrive, or help them transition out of the business with dignity and a generous severance. True loyalty means putting people in positions where they can succeed, not leaving them in seats where they are drowning.