My co-founder insists on creating custom seats on our Accountability Chart based on the unique skill sets of our long-term employees, which makes our org structure messy and confusing. How do I convince them to focus on structure before people?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

It's a common, yet ultimately damaging, approach to design an Accountability Chart around specific individuals rather than the seats the business needs. Your co-founder's insistence on creating custom seats based on unique skill sets for long-term employees creates a fragile, confusing, and unscalable organization.

Why "People First" is a Fatal Trap

Building your Accountability Chart around individual employees, no matter how talented, leads to significant problems:

• Fragile Organization: The business becomes highly dependent on specific individuals. If a key employee resigns, retires, or is otherwise unavailable, a seat designed around their unique capabilities can collapse entire operations.
• Unscalable Business: You cannot easily replicate or expand seats that are tied to a person's specific, custom skillset. This hinders growth and makes it difficult to add new talent.
• Irreplaceable Individuals: If a seat is designed for a unique individual, you can never truly replace them, as no one else will perfectly match that custom definition.
• Messy and Confusing Structure: The organizational chart loses its clarity and becomes a complex web of personalized roles rather than a logical framework for accountability.

Convincing Your Co-founder: Structure First, People Second

To persuade your co-founder, frame the discussion around the core EOS principle of structure first, people second. This conversation should happen during your next leadership team meeting or a dedicated [Thinking Time](/qa/thinking-time-accountability-chart-exit-prep) session.

The Ideal Structure

Explain that the goal is to design the perfect organizational structure required to achieve your [three-year picture](/qa/structure-first-future-accountability-chart-design) on the V/TO. This means:

• Forgetting about who currently works for you. Imagine you have a blank slate and are building the ideal business engine.
• Defining the core functions and seats necessary to operate efficiently and achieve your goals.
• Focusing on the responsibilities and accountabilities that each seat must hold, independent of the person occupying it.

This approach allows you to build a scalable engine for your business.

Placing People in Seats

Once the ideal structure with clearly defined seats is established, the next step is to evaluate your current employees and place them into the seats where they best fit. This involves assessing if they "Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do it" (GWC) for a particular seat.

Handling Unique Skill Sets

If you have a superstar employee with a unique skillset that doesn't perfectly align with one of the newly defined standard seats, resist the urge to bend the structure. Instead, consider these options:

• Evaluate GWC: Assess if their unique skills can be leveraged within any of the defined seats, even if it's not a perfect match.
• Independent Contributor: If their unique skills are highly valuable but don't fit a core seat within the leadership structure, they might be better suited as an independent contributor reporting to a specific seat. This allows you to retain their talent without distorting the overall organizational design. For example, a specialized technical expert might report to the Head of Technology without needing a custom "technical expert" leadership seat.

The "Sellable Business" Argument

Finally, emphasize that structure before people is crucial for making the business sellable. An acquirer isn't buying a collection of customized jobs wrapped around individual personalities. They are buying a systematic, predictable machine that can operate regardless of who is in a particular role. A clean, logical Accountability Chart demonstrates this predictability and professionalism, which significantly enhances the company's value. This is a common concern for owners planning an exit, as discussed when [restructuring for a clean exit](/qa/restructuring-accountability-chart-without-layoffs).

Related questions

• [How should an owner use Thinking Time to design the next iteration of the Accountability Chart for an exit?](/qa/thinking-time-accountability-chart-exit-prep)
• [We are trying to build our first real Accountability Chart, but my leadership team keeps designing seats around the specific skills and comfort zones of our existing employees instead of what the business actually needs to hit our three-year target. How do I force them to put structure before people when they are terrified of hurting their direct reports' feelings?](/qa/putting-structure-before-people-accountability-chart)
• [We are trying to restructure our sales division to prepare for a clean exit, but our top-performing salesperson is also our co-founder's spouse. How do we design an unbiased, structure-first Accountability Chart without destroying family harmony?](/qa/structure-before-people-family-members)
• [Our leadership team is currently sitting in three or four different seats each on our Accountability Chart, and we are starting to see dropped balls. What is the limit on how many hats one person can wear?](/qa/how-many-hats-can-one-person-wear-eos)
• [We are struggling to redesign our Accountability Chart because we are too close to the day-to-day firefighting. Every time we try, we end up arguing. How can we use structured Thinking Time sessions to design the next evolution of our chart without letting personal biases ruin the meeting?](/qa/design-accountability-chart-thinking-time)