We have a co-founder who is a perfect culture fit and shares our core values completely, but as we have scaled, he has failed to keep up with the complexity of his technical engineering seat. He does not GWC the seat anymore. We want to keep him because he is the heartbeat of our company culture. How do we handle this on the Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is one of the most difficult calls a business owner has to make. You have a co-founder who embodies your core values, is a beloved leader, and has been with you since the beginning, but his seat has outgrown him. He no longer has the capacity or the technical capability to manage his current engineering seat.

In EOS, this is a classic Right Person, Wrong Seat situation. You must address it immediately because keeping him in a seat he does not GWC will cause operational bottlenecks, frustrate your team, and ultimately burn him out.

Your first step is to look at your Accountability Chart and see if there is another seat where he would be a perfect fit. Is there a role that matches his skills and passions where he can deliver massive value?

If a suitable seat exists, move him. If a seat does not exist, you cannot create a fake, artificial box just to keep him comfortable. Doing so would violate the principle of structure before people. If there is no real seat for him on the chart, you must make the painful decision to transition him out of the company. It is hard, but protecting the health of the organization must come first.