Our leadership team has ballooned to ten people because managers feel excluded if they do not have a seat at the executive table, making Level 10 Meetings inefficient. How do we right-size the leadership team to three to seven seats without alienating those who are removed?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A ten-person leadership team is not an executive team. It is a town hall. Large groups destroy healthy conflict, dilute accountability, and turn your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ into a marathon of superficial updates. An effective leadership team must consist of three to seven seats maximum.

To trim the table, you must separate ego and title from the Accountability Chart.

Begin by redrawing the leadership team from the top down without names. Focus strictly on the major functional seats required to run the enterprise: typically Visionary, Integrator, Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance. You do not need five specialized department managers sitting on the leadership team. You need single seats that own broad operational outcomes.

Next, communicate the shift based on function, not personal demotion. Meet one-on-one with the leaders transitioning off the team. Explain that the leadership team exists solely to integrate the business and execute the V/TO®, not to confer company status. Their direct value, compensation, and leadership within their department remain intact, but their accountability is to drive results through their direct functional leader.

Provide an alternate operational forum. Establish departmental Level 10 Meetings™ so these managers still have structured environments to solve issues, track Rocks, and run their units without clogging executive bandwidth.

When you compress the leadership team to the true core, meeting velocity increases, trust deepens, and problem solving accelerates. The rest of the organization will quickly see that smaller, sharper leadership drives better execution for everyone.