We have two highly valuable sales directors who refuse to report to one another, so we put them both in the Head of Sales seat on our Accountability Chart. They are split geographically but performance is plateauing and execution is messy. How do we resolve this without losing one of them?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Putting two people in one seat on your Accountability Chart is a structural error that always results in finger-pointing, stalled execution, and confusion for the rest of your team. In the EOS® framework, a seat can only have one owner. When two people are accountable, nobody is accountable. To fix this without immediately losing your top performers, you must separate structure from people. Start by designing the ideal structural layout for your sales department. If your business genuinely requires two distinct geographic divisions, create two separate seats on the Accountability Chart, such as Director of East Coast Sales and Director of West Coast Sales. Both of these seats must report to a single Integrator or a single Head of Sales seat. If you cannot justify two separate departments, you must make a hard choice. One of them must occupy the singular Head of Sales seat, and the other must report to them, or one of them must move to a high-level individual contributor seat. Run both candidates through the GWC™ tool: do they get it, want it, and have the capacity to lead the entire department? Use the Trust Creation Process from the Trusted Advisor Fieldbook to have transparent, one-on-one conversations with both directors. Explain that this change is about structural health, not their personal worth. If one has a high Follow Thru score on the Kolbe Index, they might excel at the systems-building required for the department lead, while the other might prefer the client-facing autonomy of an individual contributor seat. Frame the transition around their natural conative strengths to minimize resentment.