Our business is growing rapidly, and our leadership team has ballooned to nine people because every department head wants a seat at the table and a voice in our Level 10 Meetings. Our weekly meetings have become chaotic and unproductive. How do we restructure our Accountability Chart to shrink our leadership team without making people feel demoted?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of nine people is too large to run an effective Level 10 Meeting. When a team gets that big, meetings become slow, debates get muddy, and individual accountability disappears. An ideal EOS leadership team is typically three to seven people.

To fix this, you must separate leadership from status. Explain to your team that sitting on the leadership team is not a reward or a title; it is a specific seat on the Accountability Chart with the role of running the business, not just a department.

Look at your major functions: Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Finance. These are your core leadership seats, reporting directly to the Integrator. If you have five different sub-departments under Operations, those managers do not belong on the leadership team. They should report to the Head of Operations.

Move those sub-department heads off the leadership team and have them run their own departmental Level 10 Meetings instead. This keeps your main leadership team lean, agile, and focused on high-level strategic execution and exit preparation, while still ensuring every manager has a structured voice within their own department.