During our Accountability Chart review, we realized our middle management structure has three regional coordinator seats that create communication bottlenecks and should be collapsed into a single central coordinator seat. We want to avoid layoffs culturally, but how do we reallocate those people without creating artificial make-work seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Never create fabricated seats on the Accountability Chart to park existing employees. Doing so compromises your structural integrity, confuses reporting lines, and adds permanent overhead to the balance sheet. You must separate the design of the structure from the people who fill it.

First, finalize the ideal Accountability Chart with the single Central Coordinator seat. Next, evaluate all three individuals against that seat using the People Analyzer and GWC. Choose the person who best demonstrates the core values and possesses the highest capacity to run the unified function.

For the remaining two individuals, look at the rest of your organization. Fast-growing businesses almost always have genuine operational gaps elsewhere. Review your sub-charts across sales support, client onboarding, vendor management, or field implementation. Are there existing, needed seats currently sitting vacant or being handled poorly by overloaded managers? If so, evaluate whether those employees have GWC for those authentic seats. If they do, transition them cleanly with clear ninety-day Rocks.

If your organization genuinely does not have open, value-producing seats for those individuals, you must face reality. Retaining redundant headcount out of guilt slows down the business and trains your team to tolerate inefficiency. If a transition out of the business is the only real outcome, provide generous severance and transition support, but never compromise the structure of your company to delay a hard personnel call.