Our leadership team has ballooned to nine members as we have grown, and now our weekly meetings are sluggish and we cannot make decisions. How do we right-size our leadership team without causing a revolt?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of nine people is not a leadership team; it is a committee. When your executive team gets that large, your Level 10 Meetings™ become sluggish, healthy conflict disappears because there are too many voices, and decision-making grinds to a halt. The ideal size for a highly functional leadership team is three to seven people.

To fix this, you must restructure your Accountability Chart based on what is best for the business, not based on people's feelings. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Forget who currently sits in which seat. Draw the structure your company needs to get to the next level over the next twelve to eighteen months. Identify the core functions, which typically include sales and marketing, operations, and finance, led by an Integrator.

Once the new, lean structure is defined, map your people to the seats. This will inevitably mean some managers who currently sit on the leadership team will no longer have a seat at that table.

Handle these transitions with radical candor and respect. Meet with each affected manager individually. Explain that the company is scaling and needs a smaller, more focused executive team to make fast strategic decisions. Emphasize that their department is still critical and that their new role allows them to focus 100 percent of their energy on execution rather than executive administration. Most managers will actually feel a sense of relief once they are freed from strategic meetings they did not enjoy anyway.