Our Head of Operations is drowning because their seat has expanded to include client delivery, field operations, vendor procurement, and facilities management. When does an operational seat become too big, and how do we split it cleanly without causing chaos?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

An operational seat is too big when one of three symptoms appears: the seat requires more than five core roles to describe what it owns, quarterly Rocks consistently fail due to pure operational triage, or the seat holder loses GWC because the scope demands fundamentally conflicting skill sets.

In growing businesses, Operations often becomes a catch-all dumping ground for every task that is not pure sales or accounting. Asking one person to manage client delivery excellence while simultaneously negotiating vendor contracts, overseeing facilities, and managing field technicians creates severe execution bottlenecks.

To split the seat cleanly, use your next quarterly session or Level 10 Meeting to identify the natural operational fault lines. Do not split tasks; split outcomes. Operations typically splits into two distinct, high-leverage seats:

- Client Delivery or Service Execution: This seat owns the customer experience, service quality, fulfillment speed, and day-to-day delivery metrics.
- Operational Infrastructure or Shared Services: This seat owns procurement, facilities, vendor relationships, internal technology systems, and asset logistics.

Define the five core roles for each new seat clearly. Determine whether both seats report directly to the Integrator, or if one reports into the other based on functional hierarchy. Once the structure is agreed upon, assign the existing Head of Operations to the seat that best matches their Unique Ability, and immediately recruit or elevate an operator into the second seat. This restores clarity, protects margin, and creates scalable capacity.