Everyone is Stepping On Top of Each Other

2 months ago I asked Chris “What would you improve in your business right now if you could?”   Chris owns an Atlanta-based 20 employee software company that does both onshore and offshore development.  I asked him why he didn’t just fix it he said “it’s complex.”

Chris built his company over 8 years using a ‘people first’ approach.  He aligned people to their strengths and matched those to work that needed to be done.  As he grew his company he would make changes for the needs of the business.  He would account for people who were overworked, did not like a certain technology, or had family obligations.  In one situation he said an engineer was going to leave so he changed the reporting structure to have that engineer report directly to him.

Chris could not show me an up-to-date Accountability Chart® because “it is too complex.”  It evolved over time and people just learned where to go ‘per project’ so he stopped documenting it years ago.

EOS® (Entrepreneurial Operating System) puts business owners back into their rightful seat of driving the vision of the company instead of managing the necessities of the business.  EOS Implementers start this transition on day 1 and we start with the Accountability Chart.

An EOS implementer can shift the leadership team from ‘managing’ a business to ‘leading’ a business.  That mindset change happens under the guise of building the Accountability Chart.

When I start the Accountability Chart exercise with my clients I challenge my leadership teams to forget the past and focus on what the business needs to be successful in the next 6 months.  We begin by building the ‘bones’ of a successful company that can face the market conditions of the next 6 months.  This ‘Structure First’ approach pulls the team’s minds out of the ‘day to day’ and starts the team focusing on their business as it’s own entity.  It slowly begins to pull the team out of the management of the business and into a leadership role.  After the team agrees on a structure, then we begin adding people back in.  This mindset shift typically happens in 3-4 hours.  The leadership team sometimes does not even realize the shift happens, they just know they have an Accountability Chart.