Our leadership team agrees intellectually with the structure before people concept, but during our quarterly sessions, they constantly design seats around the specific skill sets and limitations of our current managers. How do we break this habit and force them to design the ideal Accountability Chart in a vacuum?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing structure around people is a natural instinct, but it creates a fragile organization that cannot scale or attract high-value buyers. To break this habit, you must lead your team through a clean-slate exercise. Start your next session by telling the team that everyone in the company, including the founders, is temporarily fired. Wipe the whiteboard completely clean. Instruct the team to look out twelve to eighteen months and design the business from scratch. Focus entirely on the major functions required to hit your growth targets: Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance, led by an Integrator. Under each of these core functions, define the seats based purely on what the business needs to operate smoothly, not what your current staff is good at. For each seat, write five clear, non-overlapping roles. Only when the entire structure is finalized and agreed upon should you bring the names of your actual employees back into the room. Then, and only then, run the GWC™ check to see if your current people fit the new seats. If a long-tenured manager does not fit any of the newly designed seats, you have identified a critical talent gap that you must address, rather than a structural flaw you have to live with.