During a recent Annual Planning season, one of my clients was moved to tears while reflecting on the past year. He was recounting a “personal great,” and filled with pride for his daughter while sharing a few of her significant accomplishments. He struggled to finish the story, and ultimately needed to take a short break to compose himself. Throughout this touching, heartfelt moment, he kept apologizing to his team for being so emotional.
On your journey to becoming your best in business, you’ll need to make some tough people decisions. Usually those decisions revolve around Right People/Right Seat issues. In the EOS Process™ we use the People Analyzer™ with GWC™ (Get It/Want It/Capacity to Do It) to identify the root cause of a team’s specific people-related issues. The most common people issues are:
Sometimes the tough people decision is to fire an employee who doesn’t get it, want it, or have the capacity to do the job. One of my clients recently had to make that tough decision. Afterwards, the Visionary told me about the way the employee responded to being fired.
I’ve noticed a pattern this year across several good teams that have truly become great teams. Conversely, there are other teams that just remain mediocre. Why is that? It all comes down to having a great Integrator in place who owns their role.
In any entrepreneurial organization, two essential seats are the Visionary and the Integrator™. A great Visionary is driven by creativity and passion, which fuels his or her vision for the company. A great Integrator takes that vision and makes it happen throughout the organization. Without these two leaders working side by side, your company will never see the success it’s capable of achieving.
Two epidemics kill cultures: end runs and unresolved complaining. Both waste time and energy, and are ultimately toxic to the health and productivity of your company. Luckily, these epidemics can be cured by asking a simple, powerful question.
To be an effective business team, every member must be bold enough to enter the danger, engage in constructive conflict and repair the damage.
As we turn the final corner of 2017, many family-owned businesses are preparing to become more profitable in 2018. When I took the helm of our third-generation family business several years ago, I was eager to boost our profitability. But what I found was that there are a lot of profit-eaters in a family-owned business. And they can be very difficult to get rid of without a robust and objective operating system in place.
Want to have a more profitable family-owned business in 2018? Watch out for these profit-eaters!
