Two factors that must be true for every member of your Leadership Team Lao Tzu, the great Chinese sage said “A journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step”. In EOS, that first step is what we call Focus Day. And one of the most important pieces for a successful EOS journey is having the right people around the table on Focus Day. So you can imagine I spend a lot of time with new clients helping them determine who should be in that session. So what makes someone a good candidate for the Leadership Team (LT)? According to my friend and mentor, Philadelphia area Professional EOS Implementer Ed Callahan, it is two things. First, you must be able to trust every member of the LT with the most sensitive – and sometimes difficult – information in and about the company. Every member of the LT must be fully

Unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the Kansas City area, you’ve probably never heard of the steamship Arabia. It sank in the Missouri River in 1856 and was found 132 years later. Not much remarkable there. What is remarkable is WHERE the Arabia was found: in the middle of a Kansas cornfield. So how did a river steamboat find its way to a cornfield? It didn’t. The cornfield found its way to the steamboat. You see, when a river has a major flood, it doesn’t always recede to exactly where it was before the flood. If you’ve ever flown on a clear day over the Mississippi River along the border between Iowa and Illinois, you might notice some small lakes and ponds in the area that look like the meanders of a mighty river. In fact, they were – until the river flooded, receded and found a new

Vision means getting everyone in the organization 100% on the same page with where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. It is common to hear people say their organization lacks vision. That usually isn’t true.   In fact, most businesses have the opposite problem: too much vision.  That’s because everyone has their own.  People come to work every day with their own agendas and their own ideas of where the company should be tomorrow. In reality, the company is suffering from too many competing visions. In most cases, the company that has a “lack of vision” is really suffering from a lack of alignment.   Because if the Leadership Team isn’t aligned on where the organization is going, it is impossible for the rank & file to have a clue. Many companies try to solve this issue by creating inspiring, complex visions.  That actually only makes the problem

The right people means surrounding yourself with great people, top to bottom, because you can’t achieve a great vision without great people. Everybody knows that you can’t have a great business unless you have a great team.  The problem is understanding what “Great People” means for YOUR business.  Because every business has a different definition of what it means to have a great team. Building a great team is easy to say, but it is very hard to do.  Every organization has people where something just isn’t right. Maybe they have a great attitude but just don’t get the job.  Or you might have someone who is good at what they do, but they just don’t fit your culture. EOS helps you clearly hone in on exactly what’s going on so you can determine how to get the most out of all of your employees while determining which ones don’t

Data Driven decisions means cutting through all the feelings, personalities, opinions and egos, boiling your organization down to a handful of objective numbers, and giving you an absolute pulse on your business. In fast moving, entrepreneurial organizations, decisions are often made based upon “subjectives” – agendas, opinions, the loudest voice, the squeakiest wheel, or the most recent customer feedback. But good decision-making requires an accurate perspective on the business, and subjectives can lead to decisions that take a business down the wrong path. The way to avoid that is to cut through all the subjectives with real, hard data so the leadership team is managing by fact, not emotion. Nothing gives a leadership team a better pulse on what is REALLY happening in the business than a great scorecard, comprised of the critical measures that tells you exactly where you are. In EOS, the Weekly Scorecard is a rolling thirteen-week

Issues processing means becoming great at solving problems throughout the organization – setting them up, knocking them down and making them go away forever. Does addressing issues  ever feel like a deja vu experience, where your discussion of an issue sounds vaguely like something else you already thought you fixed?  Welcome to the game we call “Issue Whack-a-Mole”.  That’s the one where you think you’ve solved a problem only to find it popping up again someplace else. The truth is most issues companies struggle with aren’t really THE issue at all. They are symptoms of underlying root causes that never really get identified, let alone addressed.  Successful companies aren’t successful because they have no problems, they are successful because they are really good at identifying issues, digging deep to find the root causes of those issues and then finding a permanent solution. EOS has a clearly defined structure for smoking out issues, managing