In 2010, Gino Wickman shared some of the great lessons and observations he had gleaned from implementing EOS® with hundreds of entrepreneurial leadership teams. In reflecting on my years as Gino’s business partner and Integrator of EOS Worldwide and my own experiences working with leadership teams, it felt appropriate and timely to confirm and restate those same great lessons.
To be an effective business team, every member must be bold enough to enter the danger, engage in constructive conflict and repair the damage.
What do you say when one of your team members asks you to keep something confidential? There’s a dangerous workplace situation that all leaders and managers find themselves drawn into from time to time. I call it the “confidential complaint” trap.
This happens to me when I’m working with leadership teams. Someone will stop me in the hall during a break and say, “May I talk to you for a minute, NOT in the room with the group?”
There’s a natural inclination to say yes to this kind of request. As leaders, we all want to be approachable. We may also want to find out what’s going on inside our organization. But promising blanket confidentiality for run-of-the-mill complaints can be a dangerous slope because it is diametrically opposed to creating a healthy workplace culture.
I’ve noticed a pattern recently. In meeting with several leadership teams for the first time, I always ask the questions, “What do you want from your business? What’s your big goal?” And lately I’ve heard the same answer from business owners at three different businesses: “I want a business that can run itself. I want to be on vacation for a month and have no one notice!”
But how can you build a business that runs itself when your company has hit the ceiling?
Effective issue solving is a huge factor in running a successful business. Some company issues seem monumental and can stifle progress because of their perceived magnitude.
In film making, the 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. However, I recently learned about a 180-degree rule which can be applied to business.
I learned it from Rich Lucia who has built his speaking and consulting brand around the term Selling in the Now. Rich has applied the knowledge we have about our lizard brain, the amygdala, and it’s bias towards negativity, to harness it in a positive way in brainstorming and solution creation.
