Is Your Leadership Team Doing Too Much, or Too Little?

Gino Wickman’s book is called “Traction” for a reason. When an organization gains traction, it moves forward. Things change, issues get resolved, and the business improves in some meaningful way.

If your company needs more traction, it’s stuck. You’ve hit the ceiling, and you’re normal. You may also be frustrated, because nothing is more frustrating for an entrepreneur than an inability to overcome challenges and make positive change.

So what’s getting in your way? Why haven’t you been able to get “unstuck?”

It’s either because you’re trying to do too much, or because you’re doing too little.

When your company achieves the “Entrepreneurial Utopia” that Gino described in a recent post, you’ll be hitting on all cylinders. You and your leadership team will achieve goals, complete Rocks and solve Issues using a “Ready, Aim, Fire” approach. Like many things in business, getting there sounds easy but is really hard.

Some companies default to a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach. Led by one or more Visionaries with an endless number of ideas and boundless enthusiasm for change, they change course frequently, sign up for too many priorities and get very little done (and almost nothing done well). They become “flavor of the month” organizations where everyone is exhausted by the steady stream of latest and greatest new things.

“Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim…” is just as frustrating. For these leaders and organizations, nothing is ever good enough to be “done.” They spend hours researching, strategizing, planning, re-analyzing… well, you get the point. They never decide, they never launch, they never implement. Nobody ever hits the “GO” button.

I’ll write more about each of these faulty, frustrating approaches in subsequent posts. In the meantime, if you’re “stuck,” ask yourself whether you’re doing too much or doing too little.