One of my clients is a tech company that has been in business for 15 years. The two cofounders are still very active in the business, but over this past year their working relationship took a rough turn for the worse. How to Build a Healthy, Cohesive Team We dug into the root cause and found that Partner #1, “Bob,” was frustrated that partner #2, “Dan,” was constantly exaggerating. Challenging times in the business caused these frustrations to become very heated and intense. After digging in to find the root of these frustrations, Dan shared a story from his childhood that shed light for Bob. As a child, Dan was always put in a position where he had to exaggerate his accomplishments to gain his father’s attention. He had never thought about it before this moment, but as he shared the story he realized that this is the way he

A new year. A new beginning. Time to start afresh and anew. For many leaders of entrepreneurial companies, the beginning of a new calendar year marks the resetting of goals and the creation of a new plan for the upcoming year. I’ve been working with several clients in their annual planning sessions over the past couple of months. While a new plan and a new set of goals are great outcomes of the sessions, I now see several client companies experiencing something on a much more impactful level. Leadership teams are experiencing The EOS Life. What is the EOS Life? 1) You Do What You Love to Do… Effectively delegate to your team so that you’re freed up to spend more time on what you truly love to do. This is also where you add the most value to the business. 2) …With People You Enjoy Working With As a leader,

Do you KNOW for sure if everyone in your company is doing what they should be doing? In my last post, I focused on the importance of building a company scorecard. Today, I’d like to share a couple of terrific tools for rolling out the scorecard throughout your company.   Departmental Scorecards Boost Performance Each department of your business should have a true pulse on their area by tracking a few activity-based numbers. This is the departmental scorecard. Many teams make this more complex than it really needs to be. The goal is ultimately for every person in the company to have at least one number that they’re accountable for on a daily or weekly basis. In effect, this lets them take ownership over their own activities so they know exactly where they stand at any given moment—and you will too. Here are three examples of departmental scorecards: One team developed

Ever feel like you were caught by surprise with a sudden increase or decrease in business? Maybe you knew at a high level that it was coming, but you were surprised by the magnitude of impact the change had on different areas of your business. Years ago I had a client who was a service business with about 30 employees. Their team had made impressive investments in analytics and reporting. They had an automated system that sent the leadership team automated reports on previous period’s results. They felt like they had all the data they needed to get a pulse on the business. In fact, they felt they had too much information!   I’ll never forget our Focus Day Session—the first full-day session in the EOS Process. The owner came into the meeting with a stressed look on his face and asked his team, “Did everyone see the report this morning?”

Did you have trouble disconnecting from the grind on your last vacation? Did you find it hard to enjoy the long holiday weekend? Could you relax? I mean truly relax, where you fully disconnected from work.   Technology makes it difficult to disconnect. Our phones, a.k.a. electronic tethers, are fully equipped with texts, reminders, emails, and the occasional phone call/voicemail. Most of us are plugged in all the time, perhaps to the point where we’re beginning to forget how to turn it off. When we are constantly in Plugged-In mode, we condition ourselves to be reactive—reacting to emails, reacting to voicemails, and reacting to reminders that we’ve preset. How can you get out of this firefighting mode and get ahead? How do you become more proactive and less reactive? Finding a Pulse to Disconnect In my client sessions, electronics are not allowed for this very reason. It’s too distracting. The EOS

How much time and effort is it taking to run your business? Six months ago, I posed this question to one of my client leadership teams. They were getting good results—after all, they had been profitable and were achieving double-digit growth. But it felt like the team was expending an extraordinary about of energy, time, and effort to do so. I asked, why? This company is in the service and distribution business with around 100 employees and multiple locations. They’ve been in business for decades. But their largest location consistently had a high turnover of employees, and just seemed to always be limping along. It was a drag on the bottom line, and was consistently a source of frustration because of the number of issues that seemed to be never ending. It felt like Groundhog Day as the same issues kept resurfacing. After seeing this situation unfold with other teams,