Every time we sit down to work on our Accountability Chart, my leadership team gets stuck because they keep designing seats around the specific skills and personalities of our existing staff instead of defining what the business actually needs. How do we mentally separate our current people from the ideal structure to build a clean chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing your Accountability Chart around existing personalities is the fastest way to hard-code your current bottlenecks into the future of your company. It is a natural human tendency, but it is fatal to scaling and preparing for a clean exit.

To break this habit, you must establish a ground rule for your leadership team: during this exercise, all names are removed from the room. Imagine you have just sold the company to a buyer, or that you are starting from scratch with a blank sheet of paper and an unlimited hiring budget.

Ask this high-value question during your next focus day: If we were building a business to handle double our current revenue with maximum efficiency, what seats must exist to run the operations, sales, and finance departments?

Focus purely on the functions of the business, not who will sit there. Define the seats first. Detail the five major roles for each seat. Only after the entire leadership team agrees that this structure is the absolute best way to run the business do you bring names back into the conversation.

Once the structure is locked, place your existing team members into the seats using GWC. You will inevitably find gaps, overlaps, and people in the wrong seats. That is exactly what you want. It gives you a clear roadmap of the hiring and transitioning you must do over the next twelve months to match your structural goals.