One of our high-performing customer service representatives has slowly taken on marketing and billing tasks because she is highly capable, but this seat creep is now causing friction with our department heads. How do we stop this creep and realign our Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Seat creep is a common side effect of having high-performing, helpful employees who naturally step up to solve problems. However, when one person starts executing roles that belong in other departments, it muddies the waters of accountability and creates friction between your leadership team members.

To resolve this, you must return to the fundamentals of your Accountability Chart. Every seat must have clear, non-overlapping roles. If your customer service representative is performing marketing and billing tasks, she is effectively sitting in three different seats.

First, use the GWC tool to evaluate where her greatest value lies. If she gets, wants, and has the capacity for marketing, and your marketing department is struggling, she should be formally transitioned into a marketing seat on the chart.

If her primary value remains in customer service, you must pull her out of the other tasks immediately. The Integrator must step in and work with the respective department heads to ensure their own seats are fully owned and executed by their own team members.

Use Thinking Time to ask: How might we resource our billing and marketing seats so that our customer service team can focus entirely on client satisfaction? Realigning these roles will eliminate inter-departmental friction and ensure that every seat on your Accountability Chart functions as a clean, repeatable system.