I am an owner occupying four seats on our Accountability Chart, and our leadership team suspects I am giving myself a passing grade on seats where I am actually failing. How does an owner conduct an honest, objective GWC evaluation on themselves across multiple seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Founders are notoriously poor judges of their own performance. When you hold four seats, you create an impossible conflict of interest: you write the rules, evaluate your own execution, and grant yourself amnesty whenever metrics are missed. Your team notices this immediately, and it destroys your credibility.

To conduct an objective evaluation, decouple your status as shareholder and owner from the seats you occupy on the Accountability Chart. For each seat you hold, evaluate yourself against the five defined roles using the GWC framework:
- Do you genuinely get what the seat requires day in and day out, or are you operating on outdated assumptions from five years ago?
- Do you truly want the seat, meaning you jump out of bed excited to execute those specific roles, or are you simply hoarding the seat out of fear and control?
- Do you possess the mental, physical, and emotional capacity to execute that seat at an elite level while simultaneously holding three other seats?

Next, bring the evaluation to your leadership team. Run a quarterly People Analyzer exercise where you allow your Integrator or department peers to score you on your non-Visionary seats. If your scorecard measurables are consistently red or Rocks tied to those seats are slipping, the objective evidence shows you lack capacity.

Acknowledge the gaps publicly. Stating that you are an owner who lacks capacity for two of your operational seats is not an admission of defeat; it is the first step toward delegating and elevating. Identify the seat causing the greatest operational friction, define the measurable outcomes for that seat, and begin the transition process immediately.