We have an employee who excels at their core technical seat but also wants to take on a secondary strategic seat. Can one person sit in two completely unrelated seats on the Accountability Chart without causing confusion?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Yes, one person can sit in two completely unrelated seats, but only if they truly GWC™ both seats and have the physical capacity to do so. In growing companies, it is common for a talented team member to wear multiple hats. However, you must list their name in both boxes on the Accountability Chart to maintain absolute structural clarity.

The danger is that the unrelated seats require different mindsets. For example, if your Operations Manager also sits in the IT Support seat, they may get bogged down fixing daily software issues and neglect their operational leadership responsibilities. This creates a bottleneck and slows down the company.

To make this work, the employee must treat the two seats as distinct roles with separate responsibilities, Rocks, and scorecard metrics. They must be able to switch hats cleanly. If you notice that one seat is consistently suffering because they are focusing on the other, it means they have run out of capacity. When this happens, you must split the seats and delegate one of them to someone else. Keeping your Accountability Chart clean and ensuring every seat is fully executed is vital for operational health and long-term exit value.