Our early employees have been with us for ten years and are extremely loyal, but they lack the executive capability to run the larger departments we now have. How do we honor their loyalty without keeping them in leadership seats they cannot handle?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Loyalty is a valuable trait, but it cannot buy capability. When a loyal employee who helped you build the business from the ground up can no longer scale with their seat, you have a classic right person in the wrong seat issue. Keeping them in a leadership position they cannot handle is actually disloyal to them and to the rest of your organization. Cracks at the leadership level appear as giant canyons to the rest of the company.

To handle this, you must run them through the GWC™ tool. Do they truly get, want, and have the capacity for the seat as it exists today, not as it existed five years ago? If the answer to capacity is no, you must separate the person from the seat.

Honoring their loyalty does not mean keeping them in a role where they are failing. Instead, look at your Accountability Chart to see if there is another seat where they can excel. They might be a perfect fit for a specialized role that does not require executive management. If such a seat does not exist, you must transition them out of the company with dignity and a generous severance. Keeping them in a seat they do not GWC™ hurts the team and stalls your growth.