When building our Accountability Chart, my leadership team keeps fighting over boxes because they are terrified their titles, pay, or pet projects will disappear. How do we get our leaders to detach from their egos and focus on structure before people?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Leaders cling to boxes because they view organizational design through the lens of personal security and corporate politics. To break this dynamic, you must reset the rules of the room before you draw a single box.

Start by physically wiping every name off the board. Announce clearly that for this exercise, nobody in the room has a job, a title, or a department. The leadership team has one collective objective: design the simplest, most effective operational structure to run the business over the next six to twelve months, regardless of who currently sits in the room.

Remind the team that titles and compensation are not decided during Accountability Chart design. An Accountability Chart is an operational blueprint of functions, roles, and single-point accountability. It is not an HR payroll classification.

When a leader objects to a structural change because it impacts their current daily routine, call it out directly. Use IDS to solve the structural necessity of the function, not the comfort of the person. Ask the team: If our business burned down today and we had to rebuild it from scratch to hit our V/TO vision, does this seat need to exist?

Only after the entire structure is finalized and agreed upon by the leadership team do you begin matching names to seats using GWC. When you decouple structural design from immediate personal survival, the politics evaporate.