Answer extracted from The Conference Room with Simon Lader podcast — listen to the full episode below.
What's the first step leadership should take to support a newly promoted operations manager or accidental CEO?
Leadership must slow down and bring the entire leadership team together to design the organizational chart jointly, rather than rushing to fill seats with the wrong people. This means explicitly defining what each seat holds—its responsibilities, accountabilities, required skills, mindset and capacity—before deciding who should occupy it.
When a high-performing specialist becomes a CEO or operations manager by accident, they often inherit both a business and immediate pressure to perform. But the instinct to act fast can backfire. As Val Coyne explains in the episode, the critical first move is not to solve today's problem, but to design tomorrow's structure.
This begins with a deliberate, collective conversation. Bring the leadership team into the conference room—literally and metaphorically—and ask hard questions together: What seats do we actually need? What does each role own? What skills, mindset and capacity does each person bring? Only after this clarity can you match the right people to the right seats.
Why clarity on seats comes before placement
Many organizations skip this step and pay for it later. When seats are not explicitly defined, accountability becomes murky. Two people may think they own the same responsibility, or nobody thinks they own it at all. This ambiguity compounds as the business scales.
By defining seats first—before you worry about who fills them—you create a shared map of the organization that everyone agrees on. This map becomes the reference point for every future hire, every delegation, and every performance conversation. It also reveals whether the right people are in the right chairs, or whether gaps exist that need to be filled from outside.
For an accidental CEO or new operations manager, this process is doubly important. It signals to the team that you're not just reacting to crisis; you're building a sustainable foundation. A point detailed in this podcast episode is that this deliberation also buys trust: the leadership team feels heard, and the new leader feels supported by clarity rather than alone with ambiguity.
"Technology always, always, always comes last. Typically, first comes process, second comes people, and third comes technology."
Val Coyne — Systems and Technology Strategist, Digital Transformation Advisory Consultancy. Val began her career in hospitality, managing a family restaurant in Italy before building and scaling a chain of restaurants, bistros, bars and bakeries in Australia's Sunshine Coast. She co-founded a software startup serving the disability sector, where she mastered systems-building in rapid growth, then launched her current consultancy. She now works with C-suite executives and new CEOs to align technology, people and process into coherent operating systems.
This principle applies directly to organizational design. Before you can assign roles and responsibilities effectively, you need clarity on your processes—what your business actually does and how it flows. Then you need to know your people—their strengths and gaps. Only then does technology, tools and systems design fall into place. Jumping to structural decisions without this foundation almost always leads to misfits.
The real value of slowing down lies in preventing costly restarts later. Organizations that rush to fill seats often find themselves reorganizing within six to twelve months, which erodes team morale and creates churn. A deliberate, upfront investment in seat clarity saves time and trust in the long run. To explore more about how new leaders can build robust systems once the structure is clear, listen to the full episode on Listenly.
See also
What are the common challenges that accidental CEOs face when scaling their businesses?
Accidental CEOs—often high-performing specialists or founders—typically exhibit lack of clarity, structure and follow-through, along with resistance to delegating and letting go of day-to-day operations.
What is the responsibility framework for managing technology redundancy and software audits in growing organizations?
It is not one person's fault—it's part of business growth. However, organizations should create an explicit organizational chart with clear roles, define who owns technology decisions, and establish regular audit rhythms to catch redundancy before it becomes endemic.
How should organizations assess whether their technology stack actually supports their growth stage?
First, establish where you are in your growth journey—startup, grow up, scale up, established, or hyper growth. Match your tools to that stage; for example, a startup rarely needs enterprise-grade CRM software, while a scale-up does.