There is one critical seat on our Accountability Chart, Customer Onboarding Escalations, that is highly stressful and absolutely nobody on our leadership team or staff wants to own. How do we handle a seat that is universally avoided without forcing it on someone who will instantly burn out?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you have a critical seat that nobody wants, you are dealing with a structural design flaw or a resource bottleneck. You cannot simply force an unwilling employee into a seat they do not want, because they will fail the Want It part of the GWC™ assessment, leading to rapid burnout and dropped balls. First, you need to use IDS® to get to the root cause of why this seat is universally hated. Usually, a seat is avoided because the roles are poorly defined, the authority is mismatched with the accountability, or the seat contains a toxic mix of responsibilities. Break down the seat on your Accountability Chart and list the five major roles. Are you asking this person to solve client emergencies without giving them the authority to issue refunds or change schedules? If so, you must rewrite the roles to empower the seat. Alternatively, look at automating the lowest-value activities of that seat. If seventy percent of the stress comes from manual data entry and ticket routing, deploy AI automation to handle those tasks, leaving the human to focus only on high-value relationship resolution. If the seat is still too intense for one person to own comfortably, you may need to split the seat or hire an external candidate whose conative profile thrives on high-urgency problem solving, such as someone with a high Quick Start score on the Kolbe Index. Never leave a seat empty.