Our leadership team keeps designing Frankenstein seats that bundle unrelated tasks together just to match the unique resumes of three legacy employees. How do we force the team to design pure functional seats without considering current personalities?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Frankenstein seats happen when leaders confuse an employee personal history with the structural needs of the enterprise. When you bundle accounts receivable, warehouse dispatch, and social media posting into one seat simply because one tenured employee happens to do all three, you build an unscalable company that cannot survive employee turnover or an eventual exit.

To stop this habit, enforce the rule of structure before people during your next quarterly session. Take the leadership team through a reset exercise: assume the business was acquired yesterday, or assume every current employee won the lottery and resigned simultaneously. You have zero staff, but you still have your 3-Year Picture and current revenue commitments. What seats must exist to run sales, operations, and finance effectively?

Focus entirely on functional architecture. Every seat must have five core roles that represent clear, complementary accountabilities. Operations seats should strictly manage execution and delivery. Sales seats should focus on driving revenue and pipeline. Finance seats should protect cash, reporting, and margin. If an accountability does not logically belong in the functional department, do not graft it onto an existing seat just to balance workloads.

Once you define the seats needed to win, bring people back into the picture. Apply the People Analyzer. If your legacy employee currently does three different jobs across three departments, their name might appear in multiple boxes temporarily. That is acceptable as a stepping stone, provided each box represents a distinct, clean seat with its own five roles. Do not merge three distinct operational functions into a single mutated seat just to make an org chart look neat.