When we sit down to build our Accountability Chart, my leadership team constantly defaults to mapping out seats that match the exact resumes and current daily tasks of our existing employees. How do we break this habit and force ourselves to design the ideal structure for our three-year picture first, completely ignoring the names we currently have on the payroll?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is one of the most common traps in business. Building seats around existing people is a guaranteed way to institutionalize your current operational bottlenecks and limit your future growth. To break this habit, you must implement a strict rule during your leadership team meetings: no names allowed on the board during structure design.

Start by visualizing your company three years from now. Look at your V/TO and determine the revenue, complexity, and headcount required to achieve that target. Then, ask Keith Cunningham's classic Thinking Time question: What seats must exist in this future organization to run it flawlessly without the current leadership team doing all the heavy lifting?

Draw the boxes on the board with zero names attached. Define the five core roles for each seat based purely on what the business needs to function. Only when the entire leadership team agrees that the structure is 100 percent correct do you bring the names back into the room.

Once the structure is locked, place your current team members' names next to the boxes and run each one through the GWC evaluation. If an existing employee does not fit the newly designed seat, you must address the gap. You either find them a different seat where they pass GWC, or you must recruit externally to fill the seat with the right person. Protecting a legacy employee by warping your structure is a fast track to paying a heavy operational tax.