Several long-tenured department heads expect to be elevated into our newly formed leadership team purely out of loyalty and past tenure, but they lack the executive capability required. How do we draw the line between honoring past contributions and filling seats based strictly on GWC?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Rewarding past tenure with an executive leadership seat is one of the fastest ways to stall company growth. Early managers often demonstrated incredible grit, working long hours to get the business off the ground. However, the operational skill required to launch a company is fundamentally different from the strategic capability required to scale it.

Loyalty cannot substitute for GWC (Get it, Want it, and Capacity to do it). When you place a long-tenured employee into a leadership seat they cannot handle, you create a bottleneck for the entire business. Forward-thinking staff become frustrated by poor management, execution falters, and the leadership team spends valuable Level 10 Meeting time fixing departmental mistakes instead of driving company strategy.

Start by taking all personalities off the table. Build the Accountability Chart to represent the structure the business actually needs over the next six to twelve months to achieve the goals on your V/TO. Define the five major roles for each executive seat based purely on business function, with zero regard for who currently works at the company.

Once the seats are defined, evaluate candidates objectively using GWC and your Core Values. Does the legacy employee truly Get the strategic complexity of the seat? Do they genuinely Want the executive pressure, or are they chasing title status? Do they have the intellectual and emotional Capacity to lead managers and scale systems?

If they lack GWC for an executive role, have an honest, compassionate conversation. Acknowledge their immense historical contribution and find or create an essential specialized role where their institutional knowledge and loyalty create real value. Making seat decisions based on pity or guilt damages the enterprise and limits enterprise valuation for a future exit.