When defining the roles for seats on our Accountability Chart, some of my leadership team members are listing ten or fifteen responsibilities. How do we keep our seats simple and actionable?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

In EOS®, every seat on your Accountability Chart must be restricted to no more than five core roles. If a seat has ten or fifteen responsibilities, you have a structural error: you are either combining multiple seats into one, or you are confusing daily task lists with high-level accountability.

When a seat is overly complicated, the person sitting in it experiences cognitive overload, priorities get muddled, and execution stalls. Your leadership team must distill each seat down to the five most critical, high-impact areas of ownership that drive measurable results.

Conduct a brief "Thinking Time" exercise with your team. For each bloated seat, ask: "What are the absolute non-negotiable outcomes this seat must deliver for the business to succeed?" For instance, a Marketing Director's seat should not list "posting daily social media updates" or "ordering promotional pens." Instead, the core roles should be: LMA, brand strategy, lead generation, marketing budget management, and vendor oversight.

If a seat cannot be boiled down to five high-level roles, you have a multi-seat scenario. Split the seat into separate boxes on the chart and decide who has the GWC™ to own each function.