We have separate seats for marketing, sales, and account management on our leadership team, but the overlap is causing constant territory disputes and slow execution. How do we restructure these seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you have too many overlapping seats on your leadership team, it leads to decision paralysis and political friction. Strengthen your leadership team to become more cohesive, functional, and healthy, as this sets the tone for the entire organization. To do this, you must simplify your Accountability Chart. A healthy leadership team typically consists of three to seven people. If you have separate seats for marketing, sales, and account management, you likely have too much complexity at the top. Consider consolidating these into a single revenue or sales and marketing seat on the leadership team. This restructuring creates a single point of accountability for all customer-facing activity. The person in this consolidated seat will run their own departmental meetings to manage the separate functions of sales, marketing, and account management, but only their single voice will represent the entire division on the leadership team. Use the GWC™ tool to evaluate who on your current team has the capacity to lead this combined function. If no one fits, you may need to run an external search or temporarily have your Integrator run the seat. Redesigning your structure around the needs of the business, rather than the personalities of your current people, is the only way to eliminate territory disputes and accelerate execution.