Our business underwent a major strategic pivot over the past year, and our current leadership structure no longer fits our operational needs. How do we tear down and rebuild our leadership Accountability Chart without inciting panic or territorial power struggles?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a business changes direction, the existing Accountability Chart inevitably breaks. Founders often try to shoehorn existing executives into obsolete structures because they want to protect feelings and avoid conflict. This creates operational drag and confuses the entire company.

You must decouple the structure of the organization from the specific people currently working in it. Take your leadership team into an offsite session and state clearly that you are designing the optimal structure for the company five years into the future, ignoring who currently holds which title. Erase every name from the Accountability Chart.

Build the functional seats from the ground up based strictly on what the business requires to hit the goals outlined in your V/TO. Define the five major roles for each leadership seat with zero compromise. Only after the structure is completely agreed upon and finalized do you begin evaluating people.

Walk through each leadership seat objectively and evaluate your team members using GWC. Some leaders will fit cleanly into new seats. Other leaders may discover that their skills and desires no longer match where the company is heading. When you establish that the needs of the business always come before personal preferences, you take the emotional toxicity out of organizational restructuring and build a team built for the future.