Our leadership team has ballooned to ten people, and our Level 10 Meetings have become bloated committee discussions where no hard decisions get made. How do we prune the leadership team back to a lean core without alienating the people who lose their seat?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of ten people is not a leadership team. It is a town hall. When a leadership team grows beyond five to seven seats, accountability vanishes, healthy debate gets stifled, and the Level 10 Meeting slows to an unproductive crawl.

You must trim the team back to a lean leadership core, typically three to five key seats: the Visionary, the Integrator, and the heads of Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance.

To do this without triggering mass resignations, anchor the change entirely in the Accountability Chart, not personal performance. Explain to the entire organization that the company needs to evolve its structural architecture to manage growth effectively.

Call a meeting with the current ten members. Announce that you are re-architecting the top of the Accountability Chart to simplify communication and accelerate execution. Present the streamlined structure clearly:
- Only the functional leaders managing the major pillars of the business will sit on the core leadership team.
- Departmental managers who are moving off the team are not being demoted. They are retaining their leadership over their respective departments.
- These managers will now participate in departmental Level 10 Meetings led by their functional leader, where they will actually have more direct control over their operational issues.

Do not compromise by creating an executive committee and a wider management council that meets together. Cut the cord cleanly. The members stepping out of the room will often feel initial sting, but they usually experience tremendous relief once they are freed from strategic debates that do not impact their daily execution.