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.
Many entrepreneurs are frustrated because they aren’t getting what they want from their business. Most of them don’t understand why they’ve hit the ceiling, and they’re left spinning their wheels without gaining any traction.
Wondering why you aren’t getting what you want from your business? It comes down to one or more of the following seven business problems.
Imagine you arrive at the office one Monday morning. You flip on your laptop, go get a cup of coffee, and come back to your desk – only to discover the blue screen of death. Your laptop is completely unresponsive and you can’t do a thing because your operating system (OS) has crashed.
Without an OS, your laptop can’t function. And without an operating system for your company, your organization can’t function, either. Like your computer, your business needs an operating system to organize the way the organization functions. An OS ensures smooth communication between your leadership team and all your employees.
Chances are, you do many things well. As a business owner, this may have been imperative at times, especially in the early days when you had no choice but to do it all yourself.
Then at some point your business gained traction. The opportunities continued to grow, but so did the complexities of running the business.
Along the way, you may have become comfortable in certain roles such as being the ultimate decision maker, the go-to person for business processes, or just the person that seems to have all the right answers. Everyone wanted a piece of you!
A few months ago I published a blog post entitled Too Small To Make a Difference? The point of the article is that everyone in a business matters—from the owner to the newest “front line” hire. I further suggested that entrepreneurs work hard to engage everyone in the EOS process, including the use of Rocks, Level 10 Meetings, and Scorecards throughout the organization.
When my clients are struggling with that concept, I’ve found that a painstaking approach to clearly and simply defining these tools really helps. Because try as we might, entrepreneurial leaders and managers often over-complicate things.
Over the last 11 years I have had my business, Nexus, I have probably said this phrase, “Good people in a bad system look like bad people” 300 times (if you are one of my big math people that is just about once every two weeks). The impetus of the saying goes back to the first year of Nexus when I was working with a local client.
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