Our executive room has expanded to nine people because every department head expects a seat at the table, making our Level 10 Meetings sluggish and ineffective. How do we cut the leadership team down to four or five core seats without alienating the leaders we remove?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Nine people in a leadership room is not an executive team; it is a parliament. Large groups destroy accountability, dilute debate, and turn weekly Level 10 Meetings into boring status presentations. A healthy leadership team consists of three to seven people maximum.

To resize the table without causing mass resignations, follow these rules:
- Rebuild the Accountability Chart from scratch. Take names completely off the board. Ask: What is the simplest, most effective structure needed to operate this company over the next twelve months? In almost every business under one hundred million dollars, that consists of a Visionary, an Integrator, and three to four core functions like Sales/Marketing, Operations, and Finance.
- Collapse departmental representation. A department head does not need to sit on the executive team to be valuable. Executive seats represent broad business functions, not individual manager titles. For example, customer success, fulfillment, and IT might all roll up under a single Operations seat.
- Communicate the structural shift transparently. Announce that the leadership team is an operational engine, not a status club or compensation tier. Explain that smaller teams make faster, higher-quality decisions, freeing managers to lead their actual teams rather than sitting in executive meetings.

Compensate leaders for their departmental impact, not their presence in the room. Real leaders welcome fewer meetings when their authority over their own domain remains intact.