Most growing companies hit a point where the way the business is run no longer matches the size of the business. What worked at 10 people starts to strain at 30. What worked at 30 breaks at 75. The owner usually feels it first, often long before they can put words to it.
Here are five signs I look for when I sit down with a leadership team. If two or three of these sound familiar, the issue probably isn’t your people. It’s how the business is run.
1. Everything still runs through you
You’re the tiebreaker, the approver, and the person everyone copies “just so you know.” Decisions wait until you’re back from vacation, if you take one at all.
That felt like control when the company was small. Now it’s the ceiling. A business can only move as fast as its biggest bottleneck, and right now that might be you.
One of best feelings was when my wife and I took our 20th anniversary trip to Hawaii, and I literally deleted my Teams and Outlook apps from my phone and the team continued business without NEEDING me to get them through the time I was away. Amazing!
2. Your leadership team meets, but nothing gets solved
The weekly meeting has turned into a status report. Everyone shares updates, a few topics get talked about, and the same issues show up again next week.
A healthy leadership meeting does the opposite. Most of the time goes to finding the real issue behind the symptom, discussing it openly, and making a decision with one person accountable for the next step.
3. Everyone is busy, but no one could tell you where you’re going
Ask each person on your leadership team where the company will be in three years, and what has to be true by the end of this quarter. If you get five different answers, you don’t have one vision. You have five.
When people row hard in slightly different directions, the boat moves. It just doesn’t move very far.
4. You keep working around people issues
There’s someone in a seat who isn’t working out, and everyone knows it. Or there’s someone great sitting in the wrong seat. Instead of addressing it, the team builds workarounds: extra checks, side conversations, work quietly moved to someone else.
Workarounds feel kind in the moment. Over time they wear out your best people, who get tired of carrying the extra load.
5. You run the business on gut feel
You know roughly how things are going. But if someone asked for the handful of numbers that tell you, week by week, whether the business is on track, you’d have to go dig for them.
Gut feel got you here. It won’t warn you about a problem three months before it shows up in your financials.
What to do about it
None of these signs mean you’re failing. They mean you’ve grown enough to outgrow the way you started. That’s a good problem, but it’s still a problem.
The fix usually isn’t working harder or hiring one more manager. It’s putting a simple, consistent operating system in place so the whole leadership team runs the business the same way: a clear vision everyone shares, the right people in the right seats, a handful of numbers you review every week, a real process for solving issues, and the discipline to execute every quarter.
That’s the work I do with leadership teams using EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It works in any industry, because these problems show up in every industry.
I have met with a number of companies and I always ask “on a scale of 1-10 (10 being best), how would you rate your internal meetings”. The answers I have gotten have varied from “what meetings?” to “6 -7” on average. Rarely do I hear 9 or 10, and that is because most simply don’t have a great agenda or structure for ensuring that the teams are on the same page and know what to look at from a measurables standpoint. When they see how to run that level 10 meeting, it is the fastest and most effective tool that occurs the very first week of implementing EOS.
A simple next step
Pick the sign above that stung the most. Bring it to your next leadership meeting and ask your team one question: “Is this true for us?” Their answers will tell you a lot.
If you’d like to talk it through, I offer a complimentary 90 Minute Meeting for leadership teams. You’ll walk away with a clearer picture of where you are and what to do next, whether or not we ever work together.
Book your 90 Minute Meeting