My leadership team keeps getting stuck during our Accountability Chart exercises because they cannot stop thinking about our current employees and their feelings. How do we enforce the structure before people rule when we all know exactly who sits in which box today?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Designing an Accountability Chart around your current staff's feelings is the fastest way to build a dysfunctional business that cannot scale or exit. To break this mental block, you must enforce the structure before people rule. Start by removing all names from your whiteboard. Empty the boxes entirely. Challenge your leadership team with a specific Thinking Time question: If we were building a brand-new, highly efficient competitor from scratch to completely replace us, what seats would that business need to run flawlessly? Define the seats, the five roles under each seat, and the measurable metrics first. Only when the entire leadership team agrees that this blank structure is the absolute best way to run the business do you bring the names back to the table. When you start matching people to seats, you must be brutally honest. Use the GWC™ tool. If a loyal, long-term employee does not get, want, or have the capacity for any of the newly designed seats, you cannot rewrite the structure to accommodate them. That is a people issue, not a structural one. Keep them separate and solve the people issue using IDS®.