Our business has grown rapidly, and our leadership team has ballooned to nine people. Meetings are long, decisions are slow, and we are losing our entrepreneurial speed. How do we downsize our leadership team to a healthy size without making those we remove feel demoted or unvalued?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of nine people is structurally ineffective. When a team gets that large, meetings devolve into status updates, real debate suffocates, and decision-making slows to a crawl. A healthy, high-performing leadership team should consist of three to seven people. To right-size your team, you must decouple status from the leadership team seat.

Start by redesigning your Accountability Chart based strictly on what the business needs to run effectively, completely ignoring the personalities currently in the seats. Identify the core functions of your business, typically sales and marketing, operations, finance, and the Integrator. This exercise will naturally show you that some of the nine people do not belong on the leadership team. They belong in vital, high-level seats running their respective departments.

When you transition these individuals off the leadership team, have honest, one-on-one conversations. Explain that this change is about structural efficiency, not their personal performance. Show them how freeing them from weekly leadership meetings will actually allow them to focus on running their departments and achieving their departmental Rocks.

Frame the shift as a way to give them more autonomy over their specific areas of expertise. Ensure their compensation and title remain aligned with their high value. By presenting this as a positive structural evolution for the company, you can maintain their morale while restoring your leadership team speed and focus.