Our leadership team has bloated to nine people because I kept adding department heads, and now our Level 10 Meetings are slow and unproductive. How do I prune the team back to five core seats without triggering resignations from the leaders who lose their seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A nine-person leadership team is not a leadership team; it is a town hall. When you have too many voices around the table, meetings drag, healthy conflict evaporates into polite posturing, and decisive problem-solving grinds to a halt. Effective leadership teams operate best with three to seven seats.

The reason leadership teams bloat is almost always emotional: owners equate inviting a manager to the executive table with recognizing their value or retaining their loyalty.

To trim the table without destroying morale, ground the conversation entirely in structure, not personality. Pull out your Accountability Chart and explain that the leadership team exists to manage the business across its core functions: Sales and Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Integrator. Secondary functions like IT, quality control, customer support, or HR belong under one of those core pillars, not as independent executive seats.

Meet individually with the leaders who are moving off the team before making a public announcement. Be direct and transparent:
- Explain that the company is restructuring the executive cadence to increase speed and execution focus.
- Reassure them that their functional contributions remain vital and that their compensation, title, and departmental leadership remain intact.
- Show them how their department flows up into a specific core seat that will represent their needs and cascade decisions back down.

Some managers will feel an initial sting to their pride. Acknowledge the emotion, but hold the line. Your obligation is to the health and speed of the company. A lean, cohesive leadership team making crisp decisions will unlock far more growth and stability for those managers than sitting through an ineffective nine-person committee meeting every week.