Our leadership team has ballooned to eleven people because I did not want key managers to feel excluded, but our meetings are completely bogged down and nothing gets decided. How do we trim the leadership team down to a functional size without triggering mass resignations?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of eleven people is not a leadership team. It is a focus group. When a room gets that large, healthy conflict disappears, passive listening takes over, and your Level 10 Meeting grinds to an unproductive crawl. You diluted your executive group to avoid hurting the feelings of middle managers, and your business is paying the price through paralyzed execution.

A high-functioning leadership team almost always consists of three to seven seats: Visionary, Integrator, Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance. You must redesign the Accountability Chart from scratch based entirely on what the business requires to hit its vision, without thinking about individual personalities or job titles.

Once you define the five or six essential executive seats, announce the restructuring enterprise-wide. Explain that a leadership seat is an operational accountability, not a badge of personal worth or a reward for seniority. Transition the excluded managers into a second-tier departmental leadership council. Clarify that their job is to lead their departments, manage their direct reports, and execute Rocks, while the senior leadership team focuses exclusively on enterprise strategy, cross-functional roadblocks, and company-wide financial performance.

Some managers may experience bruised egos. Sit down with them individually, explain their critical operational role, and reaffirm their value to the company. If someone threatens to resign because they lost a meeting invitation, they care more about corporate prestige than organizational success. Let them leave.