Business leaders have a lot to do. The number of tasks that need to get done keeps expanding, and as a result the To Do list grows and grows. Some people manage tasks through sticky notes, some use technology tools such as Asana or Trello, while others use hand-written lists of stuff they need to get done. There are a lot of ways to manage tasks, but the majority of us are still overwhelmed by our To Do list.  Here’s what I experienced when I took the helm of running our 3rd generation family business. How Not to Tackle Your To-Dos When I took the helm of our family business, I was eager to make a difference and leave a lasting impact. I began to diligently capture all the things I wanted to get done. I put together a detailed agenda and brought the rest of our leadership team together

It’s no secret that most people cringe when they hear the words, “let’s have a meeting.” Most meetings are awful. When I first took the helm of our third-generation family business, I ran some pretty awful meetings. I knew I had to get the team on the same page with everything that was happening on a day-to-day basis, so I scheduled the leadership team to meet for 2-3 hours every other week. Truth be told, I dreaded meeting days because I knew it would mean several hours of preparing the agenda, along with numerous charts and graphs as backup (I was a whiz at Excel and could slice and dice data hundreds of different ways). We were scheduled to meet on Wednesdays, but something always seemed to come up—an important sales meeting, an operational firefight, or a key team member that double-booked themselves. As a result, we’d attempt to change

Ever have meetings where your team is stuck on a topic? Worse yet, you can feel when it’s about to happen because it’s happened so many times before.  Every entrepreneurial team experiences this during the course of growing their business. But to move forward as a business, you need to stop beating the dead horse! At the beginning of a journey with a new client of mine, the leadership team was stuck on an issue about how to grow their service business over the coming year. Multiple members of the leadership team were passionate about different approaches, causing a seemingly endless repetitive discussion. Every time the topic came up, they started beating the dead horse again. How to Stop Beating Dead Horses in Company Meetings Three simple techniques helped them to get unstuck. 1) The Issue Solving Track The team learned a more effective approach to tackling issues, which resulted

When you’re stuck, it can leave you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. It happens when you, your department, or your company isn’t growing anymore. It also happens when you’re growing too fast and everyone is struggling to keep up. This is a normal part of organizational growth—think of it as growing pains. In EOS, we call this Hitting the Ceiling. Acknowledging when you’ve hit the ceiling is vital, because once you and your team have acknowledged it, it just becomes an issue that needs to be solved. Many leadership teams ignore their issues or attack the surface problems when they’ve hit the ceiling. But great teams get to the root cause of why they’ve gotten stuck. These teams embrace the following five leadership abilities. 5 Critical Leadership Abilities to Break Through the Ceiling Simplify When it comes to running the business, have you intentionally simplified your communications, processes, structure, and vision? In

Clarity breaks are essential for business leaders to practice on a consistent interval. A clarity break is a scheduled time to get out of the office with just pen and paper to think. Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.” Normally I like to share stories of client sessions, but today I want to share my personal experience with clarity breaks. Something you should know about me is that I’m a doer. I love getting things done. And I have to confess that for a long time, I resisted doing clarity breaks and would skip them because I felt my time would be more valuable knocking items off my To Do list. Plus, taking time to just “think” made me feel like I wasn’t really getting stuff done—after all, “thinking”was never on my To Do list. Seeing

Many of my client leadership teams pick a 10-year timeframe to set their big business goals—hence, we call it a “10-Year Target.” But in recent client sessions, there’s been quite a bit of debate around how to set their 10-Year Target. They had to get agreement on some philosophical and process approaches before they could start doing the actual work of setting their company goals. Here are three main areas that teams tend to get hung up on when setting their big business goals. 1) What Is Your Company’s Goal-Setting Philosophy? One of my clients recently got into a debate about whether their big goal was to achieve $5 Million in revenue or $50 Million in revenue. Wow, what a huge difference in perspectives! As the team passionately debated their big goal, it became clear that they were operating on two different goal-setting philosophies. Some members wanted to set ‘em to