We have ten people sitting around our executive table because we kept adding department heads to avoid hurting feelings, and now our meetings are sluggish and indecisive. How do we prune our leadership team down to a functional size without offending those who lose their seat?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team with ten or twelve members is not an executive team; it is a committee. Healthy, high-velocity leadership teams consist of three to seven people maximum. Beyond seven, authentic debate vanishes, politicking increases, and decision-making grinds to a halt.

You solve this by decoupling leadership team seats from managerial status. Start with a blank slate and rebuild your Accountability Chart based strictly on what the business requires to hit its vision, not who currently holds a title. A standard small to mid-market company requires Visionary, Integrator, Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance.

Once those core seats are defined, establish that the leadership team consists solely of the people accountable for those enterprise-level functions. Specialized managers like IT, customer support, or production report directly to Operations. They run departments; they do not need to sit in weekly strategic executive debates.

Hold one-on-one conversations with every person stepping away from the executive table. Explain that this restructuring is about operational speed and organizational focus, not a personal demotion. Emphasize that removing them from macro-strategy meetings gives them back valuable time to lead their direct teams and hit their department metrics.

When you cut the executive room down to core functions, your Level 10 Meeting™ becomes razor-sharp, issues get solved rapidly, and overall execution accelerates.