Our Head of People and Culture is spending all their time handling transactional payroll and benefits administration instead of talent development and leadership recruiting. How do we split a player-coach seat on the Accountability Chart when the organization outgrows a single generalist?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Player-coach seats are necessary during early growth, but they inevitably collapse under their own weight as headcount expands. Transactional administrative work has immediate deadlines: payroll must run on Friday, health insurance must renew on the first of the month, and compliance filings cannot wait. Strategic leadership work, such as succession planning, leadership training, and culture building, rarely has a daily emergency attached to it.

When one person holds both the strategic and transactional roles, the urgent transactional work wins every single time. The leader burns out, and strategic growth stagnates.

To resolve this, audit the seat on your Accountability Chart. List all roles currently handled by the seat and group them into two distinct buckets: strategic talent leadership and operational administrative execution.

Create two separate seats on the Accountability Chart:
- Head of People: Accountable for leadership development, organizational culture, succession planning, high-level recruiting, and employee retention.
- HR and Payroll Administrator: Accountable for payroll processing, benefits management, onboarding paperwork, compliance records, and HR software management.

Place the administrative seat directly beneath the Head of People seat. Then, evaluate your current leader using GWC. Do they get, want, and have the capacity to lead the department strategically, or are they an administrator at heart who is uncomfortable with executive leadership?

If they excel at strategic talent development, keep them in the Head of People seat and hire or promote an HR administrator beneath them to absorb the transactional load. If their true genius is administrative precision, let them hold the HR and Payroll Administrator seat and recruit an experienced executive to lead the department.