I did not want anyone to feel left out, so our leadership team has ballooned to ten people, and now our Level 10 Meetings are bloated, slow, and completely ineffective. How do we restructure the Accountability Chart to trim the executive team without causing a massive mutiny?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team of ten people is not an executive team; it is a town hall meeting. When a team gets that large, healthy conflict dies because there are too many voices, Level 10 Meetings™ become superficial updates, and real decisions end up being made in sidebar conversations. To build a highly effective company, your leadership team should ideally be between three and seven people.

Trimming the team requires you to focus on the structure of the Accountability Chart, not the feelings of your staff. You must design the organization for the future, identifying the absolute critical seats needed to run the business. Typically, these are Sales/Marketing, Operations, and Finance, led by an Integrator™.

If you currently have ten people on the team, look at how you can consolidate seats. For example, do you have three different regional heads of operations on the team? They should report to a single Head of Operations seat, who then represents the entire department on the leadership team.

When you transition people off the leadership team, do not frame it as a demotion. Explain that to scale the business, you must streamline decision-making. Show them how their new reporting structure allows them to focus deeply on executing their departmental goals rather than sitting through strategic meetings that are not relevant to their daily work. Most leaders will actually feel a sense of relief when they are freed from the administrative burden of executive meetings.