Our leadership team has ballooned to nine people and our weekly Level 10 Meeting has become an inefficient debate club. How do we streamline the top tier of our Accountability Chart down to five seats without firing anyone or triggering mass resignations?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A nine-person leadership team is not a governing body. It is a town hall. When too many voices crowd the room, your Level 10 Meeting drags, real issues get swept under the rug, and decisions take weeks instead of minutes.

You can right-size your leadership team to five seats without terminating a single person. You achieve this by separating executive leadership from departmental management.

Start by rebuilding the Accountability Chart from scratch. Focus entirely on the three to five core functions that actually run your business: Sales and Marketing, Operations, Finance, plus your Integrator and Visionary. Those five seats form the true leadership team.

Next, seat the remaining four leaders directly beneath those executive seats on tier two of the chart. For instance, your Director of IT, Quality Manager, and Facilities Lead may report directly to the Operations seat owner rather than holding independent seats on the leadership team.

Communicate the transition plainly to your team:

- Emphasize that tier-two department heads retain their compensation, teams, and budget authority.
- Clarify that being off the leadership team frees up four hours of administrative time each week so they can focus on executing their specific departmental Rocks.
- Establish a cascading weekly meeting pulse so tier-two managers remain fully informed of all leadership decisions.

Structure must serve the growth of the company, not executive egos. Present this move as a promotion of operational focus rather than a demotion of status, and stand firm on the new five-seat structure.