Coaching the person, not the problem

“We’ll make this work,” I said.

I was on a walk with Mark, talking through a leadership hire. We had worked the search for a while. The team needed relief now, and starting over felt like the last thing anyone wanted to do. The issue was that I didn’t believe it was the right hire.

We hired him anyway, and within two months, we had to let him go. He wasn’t a bad person. He was just the wrong person for the Seat, and my gut had been telling me that before the offer ever went out.

Jamie Munoz and I talked about this on a recent episode of the Impact Moments podcast because leadership teams do this more often than they realize. When a Seat is open, the pressure on the team can build quickly. Work gets redistributed, the team starts feeling stretched, and leaders naturally want to solve the pain as fast as possible.

For teams running EOS®, right person right seat requires more than filling the box on The Accountability Chart®. It requires clear expectations, honest conversations, and enough patience to separate the person from the pressure around the Seat.

Focus Points
“Sometimes things just suck. That's okay.”
— Jamie Munoz

Impact Moments
Jamie Munoz on the Human Side of Accountability

Jamie Munoz, founder of Catalyst Integrators, joined Christine Watts and me for a conversation about the leadership moments that don’t fit neatly into a tool.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why an open Seat can make the wrong hire feel reasonable
• How accountability breaks down when the hard conversation happens too late
• What it looks like to coach the person without avoiding the decision
  

If your team has ever forced a hire, delayed a hard conversation, or tried to make the discomfort go away too quickly, this episode will resonate.

On the Calendar
Webinar:  How to Take EOS® to the Next Level

You’ve implemented EOS® at the leadership level. Now the work is getting the rest of the company running on it.

Join Marisa Smith, Expert EOS Implementer™ and co-author of Rollout, and Christine Watts, Head of Professional Services at Ninety, for a live webinar on taking EOS beyond the leadership team.

They’ll cover the four phases of Rollout, how to build buy-in, and how to cascade the five EOS foundational tools across departments using Ninety.

June 22, 2026 | 11 a.m. ET

New in Ninety
Trends View

A number being off track is only part of the story. The better question is whether it just slipped this week or has been trending that way for a while.

Ninety’s Trends View shows team performance in one place, with measurables marked as off track, at risk, or on track, so teams can walk into their Level 10 Meeting® with better context.

How to Build an EOS® Accountability Chart in Ninety

I’ve sat in too many meetings where the team loses 15 minutes trying to figure out who owns the decision.

When The Accountability Chart® is clear, the team can see the Seats, responsibilities, metrics, and owners without stopping the meeting to rebuild the Org Chart from memory.

In this blog, I show you how to build The Accountability Chart in Ninety and use it as a working tool instead of a static Org Chart.