Our founding warehouse supervisor has pristine core values, but our new automated inventory management system is far beyond his technical capacity, and operations are bottlenecked. How do we handle a beloved Right Person Wrong Seat situation when there is no obvious existing seat open for him?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a loyal, founding employee who lives your core values is overwhelmed by modernization, you have a classic Right Person, Wrong Seat situation. Keeping them in a leadership seat they cannot execute damages your company, frustrates the team working under them, and places unbearable stress on the employee.

Because this person is a Right Person who consistently hits pluses on your People Analyzer, you make every reasonable effort to keep them in the company. However, you do not keep them in a seat they cannot fulfill out of sentimentality.

Follow this disciplined sequence:

First, remove them from the Supervisory or Department Head seat on the Accountability Chart. Acknowledge that the business has scaled and the seat now requires advanced technical systems management that does not fit their natural abilities.

Second, design an individual contributor seat where their deep institutional knowledge, work ethic, and core values provide maximum benefit. In a distribution or manufacturing environment, this might look like:
- Critical spare parts procurement and vendor coordination
- Fleet safety audits and equipment maintenance tracking
- Mentoring, onboarding, and training new warehouse recruits
- Managing high-stakes physical inventory counts and shrink investigations

Third, evaluate them for the new seat using GWC. Do they truly get the new seat? Do they want it, or are they clinging to supervisory prestige? Do they have the capacity to deliver the five roles day in and day out?

If they have GWC for the newly created, value-adding seat, make the transition with dignity and maintain their compensation if your margins allow. If they reject the move or lack GWC for any available seat, you must part ways respectfully.