We restructured our leadership team and realized our long-time Director of Business Development no longer fits the new Sales seat, so our CEO wants to invent a VP of Strategic Initiatives seat to keep him on the chart. How do we kill this artificial seat and protect structure before people?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Creating a phantom seat to shelter an executive is the fastest way to rot your organization from the top down. The moment you invent a role to avoid an uncomfortable personnel conversation, you tell the entire company that personal relationships trump organizational clarity.

Structure before people is not an ideological preference. It is a strict discipline. The Accountability Chart exists to define the simplest, most effective structure needed to execute your V/TO® over the next six to twelve months. Every single seat must have five clear roles that directly serve business outcomes. If you cannot look at that seat and state exactly how it drives revenue, operations, or finance without overlapping existing seats, the seat does not exist.

Take the leadership team through the discipline:
- Erase all names from the chart and look strictly at the boxes.
- Ask the CEO to define the five major roles of this proposed seat. If those roles are actually tasks that belong under Sales, Operations, or Integrator, the seat is redundant.
- Quantify the cost. Carrying an artificial executive salary burns capital and confuses reporting lines, because nobody knows who makes final calls.

If the individual does not have GWC™ for the redesigned Sales seat, you are facing a classic Right Person, Wrong Seat reality. You either transition them to an open, legitimate seat elsewhere in the organization where they truly Get It, Want It, and have the Capacity to do it, or you treat them with dignity, provide a clean severance package, and part ways. Preserving someone's ego at the expense of your structure will cost you your best performers.