Implementing EOS® in your company has its challenges and its benefits. It isn’t for everyone. Most people aren’t open to the idea of having an objective truth-teller working with the leadership team, leading them down a path to dig deeper and deeper in the land of assumptions and misguided beliefs. Egos get in the way – after all, it’s not easy admitting you were wrong in front of your employees, your boss, or your peers. Maybe you’re asking yourself, Why would anyone willingly go through a process that can be so uncomfortable and painful at times? And they invest significant resources of time, people, and money to go through the process. What could the benefit be?   Here are five key challenges that every business owner experiences while working to build a great business – and five amazing outcomes of implementing the timeless, simple, practical EOS tools in their company.

You may have missed this article when it was published in March 2014. I’m resharing it now because I often talk with companies that could benefit from the timeless content in this post. Hope you enjoy it! -Mike Kotsis.  For many entrepreneurs, addressing people issues can be an uncomfortable task. Even though they know in their gut that something isn’t quite right, it can be difficult to pinpoint the real issue. Getting input from the rest of the leadership team can help, but it’s typically time-consuming without the proper tools. It’s usually easier to ignore the issue and hope it will resolve itself. And even if it doesn’t, the business is still functioning relatively well—maybe it’s not so bad to just keep living with the issue for a while. But the fact is, if a people issue isn’t being resolved, it’s growing deeper. The long-term effects can hinder an organization’s

“I’m not sure I’m the right person to run this company.” As I started the EOS process with a marketing agency, the CEO told his leadership team that he wasn’t sure that he was the right person to run the business. He gave everyone full permission to speak up at any time during their exercise if they thought he wasn’t the right person. It was clear that he was anxious. He wanted to do the right thing for the team and the business, and he didn’t want any elephants in the room. This CEO was unusual—not because of his doubts, but because of his honesty. It’s not at all unusual for business leaders to feel unqualified for their roles, and they often deal with fears of being found out as incompetent. It’s known as the impostor syndrome, and it’s the biggest fear CEOs face. But most leaders suffer silently, afraid

In the EOS Process™, we often use the Kolbe A™ Index with leadership teams to identify each leader’s natural instinctual strengths. When these strengths differ from one another, we can identify sources of natural conflict among the team. There have been dozens of times when I reminded a team about their Kolbe profiles, and it helped them to view conflict objectively, and not take it personally. Without knowing your Kolbe profile or the other team members’ Kolbe profiles, any conflict in your relationship can be incorrectly interpreted as a personal offense.   Kolbe Conflict On a Father-Son Team One four-member leadership team had tremendous conflict between two members of the leadership team. The two member were a father and son, and the Visionary and Integrator for the business. The Visionary would bring dozens of ideas to the table and would be ten steps ahead of everyone else. The Integrator would be still on

You may have missed this article when it was published in September 2015. I’m resharing it now because I often come across companies that could benefit from the timeless content in this post. Hope you enjoy it! -Mike Kotsis.  As your company grows, everything gets more complex. Keeping everyone in the loop used to be simple, but as more people are added to your team, it can become very cumbersome to keep everyone in the loop. Processes, systems and communications that seemed to happen automatically at one time, don’t occur so easily anymore. Then it begins to snowball. Workarounds and additional steps get added. Bandages are put in place to cover up the loose ends. Longer hours and working harder become the norm “just to catch up.” At this point it becomes tough to even see what the real issue is. Sound familiar? Structural Blind Spots In a recent session with

I have a client with two brothers on the leadership team, who disagreed about how to handle employee-challenge situations. The company has three locations with multiple shifts. Frustrations among midlevel managers were brewing when one of the leaders came across as harsh and cold over something that others considered to be a small issue. The trouble was that the leader didn’t have an awareness of how his actions affected the midlevel managers. They were frustrated, hurt, and demotivated by this repetitive behavior.   As it happens, the leadership team had just read the book Primal Leadership – a book about emotional intelligence (EI). The book discusses four areas of EI: Self-awareness – Understanding how other people perceive you Self-management – Ability to manage your emotions Social awareness – Recognizing emotions in others Relationship management – Ability to manage interactions of your relationships We soon realized that the brother has a challenge of