5 Ways EOS® Transforms Non-profit Organizations

Tens of thousands of entrepreneurial companies have achieved greater Traction™ and success using the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®). But what about non-profit organizations, churches and private schools? Can EOS help these organizations to run more effectively and achieve their goals?

While EOS was developed with for-profit businesses in mind, the same core principles apply to non-profit organizations that are willing to be innovative and entrepreneurial. If your leadership team is open, honest, and willing to be vulnerable with each other, then you’re the right kind of organization to run on EOS.

Any organization that relies on people to do its work can benefit from the Entrepreneurial Operating System. At the end of the day, EOS is designed to harness human energy into one direction.

Let’s look at five ways EOS can benefit your non-profit organization

5 Ways EOS Transforms Non-profits

1) Get alignment on mission

Perhaps more than any for-profit business, a non-profit is mission-driven. To be effective, it is critical that everyone in your organization is aligned on what that mission is and what that means. The EOS V/TO™ helps you to identify, clarify, and communicate that.

2) Enjoy greater accountability

For many non-profits, a looser organizational structure results in less accountability among team members. Balls get dropped, tasks take longer to complete, and miscommunications create bottlenecks.

If you can establish a clear understanding of who is accountable for what, suddenly you have to have clear roles and responsibilities. Work gets completed more effectively and fewer balls are dropped. The importance of this cannot be underestimated, especially since most non-profits, churches, and private schools are on a tight budget—you simply don’t have the luxury of wasting time, money, or other resources.

EOS helps you clarify who is responsible for what areas, and what it looks like to have the Right Person in the Right Seat™. This boosts your team’s effectiveness and takes your hiring and firing to the next level.

3) Run meetings with meaning

Non-profit organizations are infamous for long, drawn-out meetings that have very little value. They’re known for rambling on with extensive report-outs that apply to very few of the meeting attendees. By the time they get to the New Business items at the bottom of the agenda, no one has any energy left—and this is often the most important part of the meeting.

Imagine running meetings that get things done, identifying issues at the root cause, and solving them for the greater good, long term of the organization. The Level 10 Meeting™ format in EOS provides a structure that’s well-suited to non-profits that want their meetings to produce results.

4) Track your success

Could your organization benefit from having a weekly Scorecard that tracks a handful of key measurables? At first glance, your non-profit, church, or private school might balk at the idea of being numbers-oriented. You’re not a business and you don’t want to mechanize your mission. But tracking important numbers helps you ensure that the leadership team is on top of what’s really going on each and every week in the organization.

Is your attendance declining? Are your budget and giving on track? Are you hitting your program goals? Are you reducing wasted time and resources? You can find more value than you might expect in tracking important numbers.

The EOS Scorecard is designed to help you understand where you’re succeeding, and where you can improve your organization’s effectiveness. Most importantly, it ensures that your weekly activities are the right ones that give you a pulse on the organization’s future financial health.

5) Achieve your top priorities

In EOS, the concept of Rocks helps you prioritize what’s most important for the next 90 days. It helps you agree on the most important things, rather than each person individually deciding their most important areas of focus. Even if your hearts are in the right place, pet projects and individual priorities pull your organization in several directions at once, getting you stuck and unable to accomplish your mission.

Rocks establish your 3-7 most important priorities for the quarter—for the entire organization, for each member of the leadership team, and ultimately for each person in the organization. These are the things that take top focus and priority over everything else, and together they help your non-profit achieve your organization’s mission faster.

Imagine if everyone in your organization were clear on just one Rock—their Number One priority for the quarter. This activity is the most important use of their time for the next 90 days in order to move your organization forward. It isn’t decided in isolation, it’s decided under the context of the vision that the leadership team has agreed to. So you know every person’s top priority is the right top priority.

A Mission Worth Getting Behind

When your non-profit, church or private school runs on EOS, everyone is rowing in the same direction. You have a crystal-clear vision for the organization that empowers your people and volunteers to say, “I really do know what this organization is all about.”

As a result, they can get more fully invested into your organization because it resonates with their hearts. You want people to align with your vision, to be committed to it, so they can be more deeply involved.

Running on EOS can help you get there.

Learn more about EOS—download a free chapter of Traction, the book that introduces you to EOS.