Nobody Calls Me Asking for a Better Leadership Team
By Brian Sulka, EOS Implementer, Atlanta
In six years of implementing EOS around Atlanta, no owner has ever called me asking for a stronger leadership team.
They call because they keep missing their numbers. Because good people keep leaving. Because they want to hand the business to a son or daughter someday and know it isn’t ready. Because every decision still ends up on their desk.
Before I learned about EOS, companies brought me in to fix broken teams. At one company I took over four of them in three years. I expected four different problems, and at first glance that’s what I saw: one team had a quality issue, one a hiring issue, one kept blowing deadlines.
Underneath, each had the same problem. The leaders weren’t aligned on where they were going, nobody clearly owned the results, and no one would say the hard thing out loud. Once we fixed that, the “real” problems mostly fixed themselves.
That’s where my core belief comes from: “Great Leaders and Managers Can Solve Almost Any Business Problem.”
I saw it again as COO of a frozen fruit importer that grew into the largest in the country. Our product and our market mattered. But what let us grow was the talent and motivation of the team.
EOS is how I help teams build that now. It’s a simple system: get the leadership team on the same page about where the company is headed, put one owner on every important number, and meet weekly to solve issues instead of circling them. There’s nothing fancy about it. Teams stick with it because it works.
So, if you run a company in Atlanta and one of those problems sounds familiar, try asking yourself a different question. Not “how do I fix this?” but “if my leadership team were truly strong, would this still be a problem?”
For most owners, the honest answer is no. That’s where I’d start.
Brian Sulka is an EOS Implementer in Sandy Springs working with leadership teams at privately held companies across metro Atlanta.