Our head of delivery was great when we were doing five million in revenue, but at fifteen million they are constantly dropping balls and acting as a bottleneck. How do we objectively determine whether they can scale with coaching or need to be replaced?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You evaluate them against the two fundamental EOS criteria: Core Values and GWC. You already know they match your Core Values, otherwise they would not have survived this long. The issue is almost certainly capacity within their GWC profile.

Capacity is not just intelligence or willingness to work long hours. Capacity represents the mental, emotional, and physical capability to handle the complexity, speed, and volume of the business at its new altitude. When a company triples in size, the delivery seat shifts from supervising individual projects to building automated systems, managing managers, and architecting scalable capacity.

Sit down with this person and review their seat on the Accountability Chart. Walk through their five core roles. Be brutally honest about where balls are dropping. Ask them direct questions: Do you feel energized by this new level of complexity, or are you drowning? Give them a sixty-day window with distinct, measurable performance milestones. If they need to build systems, assign those as explicit Rocks.

If they hit those Rocks and embrace the tools, they are scaling. If they continue to work eighty hours a week fighting daily fires while missing strategic outcomes, they lack the capacity for this larger seat. Keeping them there is unfair to the company and cruel to them. Your job is to put the right person in the seat, even if that means moving a loyal veteran to a specialized operational role or helping them exit cleanly.