We have a legacy administrative employee who is a perfect core values fit and is deeply loyal, but as we scale, our structured seats require technical skills they simply do not possess. We find ourselves trying to invent new, arbitrary roles just to keep them on the Accountability Chart. How do we handle this?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic right-person-wrong-seat dilemma, and trying to invent a customized seat around a legacy employee is a costly mistake. When you draw seats around people instead of structuring the business for growth, you create operational bottlenecks and set a dangerous precedent for the rest of your organization.

You must put structure before people. Start by looking at your Accountability Chart with blank eyes, pretending you are building the company from scratch. What are the essential seats required to run your operations and hit your three-year picture? Define the five critical roles and measurables for each seat first, without thinking about who will fill them.

Once your ideal structure is built, evaluate your legacy employee against the newly defined seats using the GWC™ framework. Do they truly understand the seat, want it, and have the physical, mental, and emotional capacity to perform the roles? If the honest answer is no, then you have a right-person-wrong-seat situation.

You have two options. First, look across the entire organization to see if there is another seat where they are a perfect GWC™ fit. If a suitable seat exists, transition them. If no such seat exists, you must make the hard, unsentimental call to transition them out of the company. Keeping someone in a seat they cannot perform is unfair to them, frustrating to the team, and damaging to your goal of building a clean, scalable business.