When designing our Accountability Chart, we find ourselves structuring seats around the specific talents and personalities of our current team members. How do we separate the people from the seats to build a scalable organization?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The most common mistake when building an Accountability Chart is designing seats around existing employees. This approach limits your organization's growth to the current capabilities of your staff and creates massive operational bottlenecks. To build a scalable business, you must design the structure first, completely independent of the people currently on your payroll. Start by defining the functional seats your business needs to reach its goals over the next twelve to eighteen months. For each seat, outline the five major roles and responsibilities required for that position to be successful. Focus purely on what the organization needs to operate efficiently. Once the structure is finalized, only then do you look at your people. Evaluate each team member against the seats using the GWC™ framework: do they get it, do they want it, and do they have the capacity to do it? If a current employee does not fit the newly designed seat, you must have the courage to make a change. They may be a better fit for a different seat, or you may need to hire external talent to fill the gap. By separating the people from the structure, you build an objective, highly efficient organization that is designed to scale rather than a fragile system held together by personal workarounds.