The rest of my leadership team knows one of our long-tenured executives is no longer capable of running their seat, but they hesitate to speak up because of my personal friendship with them. How do I address this blind spot without eroding my credibility?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Your friendship with a long-tenured leader creates an elephant in the room that destroys team trust. When other executives see someone underperforming without consequence, they conclude that personal loyalty trumps performance. This breeds quiet resentment and stops your best leaders from speaking candidly.

You must address this issue directly with the leadership team before your credibility evaporates. Open your next quarterly session or one-on-one reviews by giving the team explicit permission to evaluate every seat on the Accountability Chart objectively, including your friend's.

Follow these steps to handle the situation cleanly:
- Run an objective GWC evaluation on the seat. Separate past loyalty from present capacity. Does the person still Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do it at your current scale?
- Solicit direct feedback from the Integrator and other peers regarding cross-functional friction caused by this seat.
- Have the difficult conversation privately with your long-tenured friend. Acknowledge their past contributions, but be completely candid about where the business has outgrown their current skill set.

Protecting an incapable friend out of loyalty is not kindness. It exhausts the friend, frustrates high-performing peers, and signals to the entire company that personal relationships outweigh core values and execution.