My leadership team claims they understand the structure-before-people rule, but during our quarterly sessions, they keep arguing that we must define our new Business Development seat based on our current director's unique background in technical engineering. How do I force them to detach the individual from the seat design?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic trap where the team is pretending to follow the rule while secretly building a comfortable home for their favorite people. To break this habit, you must visually and mentally remove everyone from the organization. Imagine that your entire team won the lottery tonight and quit. Tomorrow morning, you have a completely blank canvas. What is the ideal structure required to run and scale this business to your three-year target? Have your leadership team build the Accountability Chart under this exact premise. Do not let them mention any current employee's name or background. If someone says, 'But our current director does X,' call them out immediately. Focus strictly on defining the five major roles for that Business Development seat. The roles must reflect what the business needs, which might be pure sales strategy, pipeline generation, and relationship closing. If your current director has a technical engineering background but cannot execute those core sales roles, then they do not GWC that seat. Once the seat is designed objectively, you can decide whether to train the director, move them to a technical product seat, or hire an external candidate. Designing the seat around their engineering skills creates a distorted organization that will fail to scale.