I have a loyal VP who has been with me for ten years and represents the soul of our culture, but they are consistently failing to hit their Rocks and clearly do not GWC the seat as we scale. How do I balance my personal loyalty to them with the hard operational reality that they are holding the rest of the leadership team back?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Loyalty is a core value, but blind loyalty that protects underperformance is actually a disservice to your entire organization. When a long term leader no longer fits their seat on the Accountability Chart, keeping them there creates resentment across the rest of the leadership team. You are forced to constantly compensate for their gaps, which slows down operations and signals to the rest of the company that performance does not actually matter.

To resolve this, you must run them through the GWC™ filter. Do they truly get, want, and have the capacity to do the job as it is defined today, not as it was five years ago? Capacity is where most legacy leaders fail when a business scales. They simply do not have the cognitive or conative bandwidth to manage a larger, more complex operation.

Your job as the owner is to separate the person from the seat. They can still be a valuable asset to the company, but they cannot remain in a leadership seat they do not GWC™. Have an open, honest conversation. State clearly that the business has evolved, and the requirements of the seat have outpaced their current capacity.

Explore whether there is another seat in the organization where they can shine, or help them transition out of the company with dignity and a generous severance package. Transitioning them out of a seat they are drowning in is actually the kindest thing you can do for them, and it is the only way to protect the future of the business.