Our Head of Operations is constantly taking on extra responsibilities like managing our physical facilities and overseeing IT security, but none of these roles are officially on her seat on the Accountability Chart. She is starting to burn out, but she resists giving up these tasks. How do we clean this up?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic case of seat creep. High-performing leaders often vacuum up random responsibilities because they want to ensure things get done, but this creates a massive risk of burnout and hides the true staffing needs of the business. To clean this up, you must run a discovery exercise on her daily and weekly tasks. Compare her actual activities against the five core roles defined for her Operations seat on the Accountability Chart. Any task that does not directly align with those five roles must be stripped out and placed where it actually belongs. If those seats do not exist yet, you must create them, even if they are temporarily empty or assigned to other people. Explain to her that holding onto these auxiliary tasks is actually holding the company back from scaling and preparing for a clean exit. Frame the delegation not as a loss of control, but as a way to free up her capacity to focus on her core operational rocks. If she continues to resist, you must address it as a core values or alignment issue. An exit-ready business requires a clean, transparent chart where every role is clearly accounted for and properly scaled.