We hired an executive with deep enterprise experience, but they are drowning our team in forty-page slide decks, steering committees, and corporate jargon instead of solving problems. How do we strip the corporate bureaucracy out of this leader before it slows us down?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Executives hired from Fortune 500 environments are conditioned to believe that slide decks, steering committees, and political consensus represent productive work. In an entrepreneurial company running on EOS, that behavior grinds operational momentum to a halt. You must deprogram corporate habits immediately.

Start by banning slides and presentation decks from your internal leadership meetings. Explain that your leadership team operates through the Level 10 Meeting format. Issues are not presented through sixty-minute monologues. They are placed on the Issues List and solved through IDS: Identify the root cause, Discuss solutions openly, and Solve with clear action items and single-threaded ownership.

Next, eliminate exploratory committees. If the executive wants to address a problem, check the Accountability Chart. If the problem falls within their seat, they have the authority and accountability to make the call. If it touches multiple departments, bring it to the weekly leadership meeting. We do not form working groups to dilute decision-making responsibility.

Give direct feedback using your core values. Tell the executive that speed, simplicity, and decisive action are essential metrics of success here. Let them know that their value is measured by the clarity of their scorecard numbers and completed Rocks, not by the thickness of their reports.

If they adapt and lean into entrepreneurial simplicity, their enterprise expertise will become a major asset. If they cannot function without layers of corporate bureaucracy, they lack GWC for an entrepreneurial seat and must be replaced.