My leadership team keeps designing our Accountability Chart around the current staff and their individual skills rather than building the ideal structure for future growth. How do I get them to separate seats from people?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing an Accountability Chart around current staff is one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurial companies make. When you customize seats to fit the unique preferences, limitations, or quirks of your existing team, you institutionalize inefficiency, create overlapping responsibilities, and make it impossible to scale or exit.

To break this habit, take all names off the board completely. When facilitating or working through your chart, forbid the team from mentioning specific individuals. Ask this guiding question: If we were starting this company today with zero employees, what is the ideal structure we would need over the next twelve months to execute our V/TO®?

Focus first on the core functions. Every business must have seats for Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance, led by an Integrator. Define the five core roles for each seat without worrying about who currently handles those duties. The roles must describe what the business needs, not what a specific person enjoys doing.

Only after the structure is finalized, voted on, and approved should you bring names back into the conversation. Evaluate your people against those newly defined seats using core values and GWC™.

You will likely discover that some current employees do not fit the new seats, or that one person has been holding three fragmented roles. That is the point of the exercise. Structure dictates hiring and execution, not the other way around. If you design the company around current personnel, you anchor your future to their current limitations.