Our leadership team has grown to eight people because we wanted everyone to feel included, but our weekly meetings have become sluggish and we cannot make decisions quickly. How do we restructure the Accountability Chart to shrink the leadership team back to a lean, functional size without making those we remove feel demoted or marginalized?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of eight people is too large. When you have that many voices in the room, meetings become updates rather than active problem-solving sessions, and decision-making stalls. A highly functional leadership team should ideally consist of three to seven people.

To fix this, you must decouple leadership team seats from personal status or ego. Rebuild your Accountability Chart from scratch, starting with what the business needs, not who currently sits on the team. Define the core functions needed to run the business at its next stage of growth, typically sales, operations, and finance, led by an Integrator.

Once the lean structure is defined, meet individually with the leaders whose seats are being removed from the leadership team. Frame this change clearly and with empathy. Explain that the business needs a smaller, more agile core team to make rapid tactical decisions, and that removing them from this weekly meeting is not a reflection of their performance or their value to the company.

Show them that freeing them from the leadership team meeting actually allows them to focus 100 percent of their energy on running their departments, achieving their Rocks, and leading their own teams. Keep them connected to the big picture by ensuring their department heads cascade leadership decisions down to them quickly, and continue to include them in quarterly strategic updates.