Rapid growth has left us with an oversized leadership team of nine people with inflated titles and overlapping duties. How do we shrink the team back to a lean core without losing key talent?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of nine people is not an executive team. It is a town hall meeting. When teams exceed five to seven people, candor evaporates, meetings crawl, and true accountability vanishes.

Shrinking the leadership team requires restructuring based on structure first, people second.

Begin by stripping away titles. Forget who is currently called a Vice President or Director. Open a blank Accountability Chart and design the simplest, most effective structure needed to run the business over the next six to twelve months. In the EOS® model, the top of the chart almost always consists of five to seven seats: Visionary, Integrator, Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance.

Once the ideal structure is established, fit the people to the seats using GWC™. Some existing leadership members will not have a seat at the executive table.

Have open, direct conversations with those who are being transitioned out of the leadership team. Explain that the change is structural, not punitive. Their contribution remains critical, but their seat now lives on the next tier of the Accountability Chart, leading their departmental team. They will run departmental Level 10 Meetings™ and execute functional Rocks instead of spending time on enterprise-wide governance.

Some individuals may struggle with their ego or title perception. Address it head-on. Make it clear that executive leadership is a functional responsibility, not a trophy of seniority. Those who embrace the mission will thrive with sharper focus, and those who refuse to accept the change were never aligned with enterprise growth anyway.