Our leadership team is struggling to design our future three-year Accountability Chart because they keep arguing about our current budget and which employees we can actually afford to hire. How do we keep the focus on structure first?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The most common mistake leadership teams make during the Accountability Chart exercise is letting current budget limitations dictate their structural design. When you design your three-year chart, you must completely ignore your current payroll, your current people, and your current budget. You are building the ideal structure to run a business that is three times larger than you are today.

Start by looking at your V/TO® and identifying where you want the company to be in three years. This big-picture view is crucial for future planning, similar to how one might [rewrite the 3-Year Picture](/qa/customer-expectations-shifting-ai-vto) to adapt to changing customer expectations.

Then, follow these steps to build your future structure:

• Map out the exact seats required to support that level of revenue and complexity.
• Define the five key roles for each seat without thinking about who will fill them. Focus purely on the responsibilities needed. This avoids the trap of [resolving leadership turf wars](/qa/resolving-leadership-turf-wars-accountability-chart) by prematurely assigning people to seats.
• Identify where your current team members fit and highlight the gaps where you have vacant seats.
• Use this future-focused chart as a strategic hiring road map for your quarterly Rocks. This strategic approach ensures you are building for the future, not just reacting to immediate needs, and helps avoid issues like [splitting an Operations seat](/qa/splitting-operations-seat-on-accountability-chart) without a clear long-term plan.

By separating the design of the structure from your current financial constraints, you ensure that you are building a scalable business model rather than just formalizing your current operational bottlenecks. Some of your existing leaders will have to sit in multiple seats temporarily, but you will have a clear path forward. This approach helps in situations where owners are [currently sitting in four seats](/qa/how-to-delegate-four-seats-using-kolbe) and need a plan to delegate.

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