Our department heads are great at technical execution but terrible at Leadership, Management, and Accountability (LMA). Can we strip LMA out of their seats and create a centralized 'People Manager' seat to handle the team management?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Stripping LMA out of your leadership seats is a major mistake that will destroy your organizational structure. In the EOS® model, every seat that has direct reports has LMA as its very first role. You cannot separate technical management from people management. If a department head is not leading, managing, and holding their team accountable, they are not actually running their department.

Creating a separate, centralized people manager seat only creates confusion and double-reporting. Employees will not know whether to listen to their technical manager or their people manager, leading to politics and execution gaps. If your department heads are failing at LMA, you have a right-person-in-the-wrong-seat issue.

You must address this directly. First, provide training and coaching to help them develop their LMA skills. Let them know what is expected of them in their seat. If they still cannot GWC™ the LMA portion of their seat after support and coaching, you must make a hard call. You may need to transition them to a highly specialized, individual contributor seat where they have no direct reports, and bring in a true leader who can handle both the technical oversight and the LMA responsibilities. This ensures a clean, scalable structure that buyers will respect.