Our business is growing rapidly, but whenever we try to update our Accountability Chart, my leadership team gets stuck trying to protect the feelings of long-term employees whose current skill sets do not match our future needs. How do we completely separate the structural design of the organization from the people currently working in it?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You must take all names off the board before you draw a single box. When leadership teams try to architect an organization around existing personalities, they build compromises instead of a scalable structure. You end up bending seats to fit personal strengths and weaknesses, which guarantees confusion and execution leaks down the road.

Take your leadership team into an offsite mindset and wipe the slate clean. Look strictly at where the business needs to be over the next six to twelve months to achieve the goals defined in your V/TO®. Ask one question: What is the ideal structure to run this business efficiently, regardless of who currently works here?

Build the chart from the top down. Start with the Visionary and Integrator seats, followed by the core functional seats: typically Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance. Define the five core roles for each seat without discussing candidates or employees.

Only after the structural skeleton is finalized and agreed upon do you begin evaluating people. At that stage, use the People Analyzer to assess candidates against your Core Values and GWC™ (Gets It, Wants It, and has the Capacity to do it).

If a loyal employee does not have the capacity for a newly defined seat, you must not warp the seat to accommodate them. You either find a seat where they are above the bar, or you make the hard decision to transition them out. The structure serves the company vision; the people must fit the structure.