Our leadership team has slowly grown to nine members because we wanted to keep our key managers feeling included, but our weekly meetings have become slow, bureaucratic, and ineffective. How do we reduce the size of our leadership team without causing a major dip in morale and engagement?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your leadership team grows beyond seven people, human dynamics change. Meetings stop being focused and collaborative and instead become a series of status updates where everyone speaks just to prove they are working. To scale, you must separate the desire for inclusion from the functional reality of running a business.

A healthy leadership team is comprised of three to seven people. If you have nine, you do not have a leadership team; you have a committee. To fix this, you must look at your Accountability Chart objectively, without names. Identify the core functions required to run the company, typically sales, marketing, operations, and finance. These are the only seats that belong on the leadership team.

Once you have mapped out the correct structure, have honest, individual conversations with the people whose seats are being moved off the leadership team. Explain that this is not a demotion or a reflection of their value. It is a necessary structural change to make the company more agile.

To maintain their engagement and morale, show them how their work still directly impacts the high-level business goals. They will still own departmental Rocks and run their own departmental Level 10 Meeting™. They will still have a direct line to a leadership team member who represents their department.

The transition will cause short-term discomfort, but the long-term benefit is massive. Your weekly leadership meetings will become fast, intense, and highly productive. Your managers will actually appreciate being freed from high-level meetings that do not impact their day-to-day work, allowing them to focus on execution.