We have a superstar employee who does a little bit of marketing, product development, and IT. How do we represent this multi-functional helper on our Accountability Chart without ruining our department structures?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic small business trap. You are trying to build your Accountability Chart around a unique individual rather than the needs of the business. Doing this creates structural confusion, makes it impossible to scale, and leaves you highly vulnerable if that superstar leaves.

To fix this, you must separate the seats from the person. Design your Accountability Chart exactly as it should look if you were a larger, fully optimized company. Create a distinct Marketing seat, a distinct Product Development seat, and a distinct IT seat, each with its own five core roles.

If your superstar is currently doing work across all three areas, their name must go into all three seats. This makes it visually clear that they are wearing three different hats. They must run three different sets of responsibilities and have clear, separate metrics for each role.

As your business grows, this visual representation makes it easy to see where you need to hire. When the workload in any of those seats becomes too heavy, you can hire a specialist to take over that specific seat, allowing your superstar to step out of it and focus where they provide the most value.

Never create a hybrid, catch-all seat on your chart. Keep the structure clean, assign the names to the seats, and split them as you scale.