Our leadership team is highly analytical, and in an effort to be thorough, they have designed an Accountability Chart with over forty highly specialized seats for our twenty-person company. This is causing massive confusion and administrative bloat. How do we simplify our structure?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You have fallen into the trap of over-complicating your structure. An Accountability Chart should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. When you create too many specialized seats, you dilute accountability, create unnecessary silos, and increase communication friction.

For a twenty-person company, forty seats is far too many. You need to collapse these highly specialized seats back into core functional areas. Start with the major functions: Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance/Administration. Each seat should have no more than five broad, clear roles.

If a seat has ten or fifteen roles, or if you have multiple seats that only take up five percent of someone's time, you need to consolidate them. Use the Kolbe framework to see if your analytical team's high Fact-Finder scores are driving them to over-engineer the structure.

Simplify the chart so that every employee can easily see who owns what. A clean, simple structure always beats a complex, theoretical one. Focus on outcomes rather than tasks. When everyone is clear on their five core roles, operations will instantly become more efficient.