We need to fill our newly opened Head of Sales seat on our Accountability Chart. Our top account executive has great core values and wants the seat desperately, but she lacks the strategic capacity to build compensation plans and pipeline forecasts. Do we promote her anyway or hire externally?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Do not promote an internal candidate who fails any element of GWC, especially capacity, simply to reward tenure or loyalty. When an individual has Get and Want, but lacks Capacity, promoting them into a leadership seat sets them up for public failure and damages your bottom line.

Capacity is not merely a willingness to work long hours. It encompasses the intellectual capability, emotional intelligence, past experience, and conative wiring required to perform the five core roles of that seat at a high level. Building multi-tiered sales compensation models, establishing complex CRM pipeline metrics, and leading seasoned professionals require specific skills that cannot be acquired overnight through optimism alone.

If you put someone into a leadership seat hoping they will grow into the capacity, you will spend months micromanaging them, creating frustration on both sides and stalling company revenue. Instead, make the hard call and run a disciplined search for an external candidate who genuinely gets it, wants it, and has proven capacity to execute every role in that seat.

Keep your top account executive in a high-producing sales seat where her core values and production excel. Compensate her generously for driving revenue. Make it clear that individual contribution and managerial leadership are two distinct paths on the Accountability Chart, and protect your leadership team from capacity deficits.