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

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