The Hardest Leadership Ability

In a recent quarterly planning session, a client leadership team was struggling with more “people issues” than normal in a period of fast growth and expanding staff. Comments like “He doesn’t get it,” “No capacity to do it,” and “No common sense” were to be common complaints.

As we dove into the root causes of each issue, it soon became clear that all the employees being discussed were relatively recent hires. “Let’s look at how we’re leading them,”, I suggested. “Are we exercising our leadership abilities to their fullest?”

In the EOS Process®, we teach Five Leadership Abilities™ that teams develop through the application of the EOS Foundational Tools™: the abilities to simplify, delegate, predict, systemize, and structure. The first of these, the ability to simplify the business, often affects how easily a growing business can improve productivity and team focus. These ultimately determine how quickly they can scale the business.

Simplifying a business as it grows is often the most difficult leadership ability to master. The reason is that all of us learn bite-sized chunks of any complex job before we can intuitively understand the end-to-end workflow. Think of parallel parking or docking a boat. You make lots of mistakes through trial-and-error, but with practice, it quickly becomes second nature.

Leaders working inside their business see it in the context of their own understanding and experience. It’s impossible for them to see it as an uninformed beginner. They often get frustrated when others don’t see it the way they do, forgetting about their own years of experience. They subconsciously attribute to others a level of understanding that doesn’t exist.

Diving into their people issues, we quickly discovered that they were weak in their Process Component™ and their Data Component™. Each of their new people had been thrown into the job without good onboarding (HR Process), and none had a good understanding of their operations process because of lack of documentation.  There were no departmental Scorecards or individual measurables to define team or personal success each week. Further, the leadership team was inconsistent with their communication and feedback (LMA-leadership/management/accountability).

A famous comic strip called “Pogo” once captured this common management dilemma: “We’ve met the enemy and they are us”. After digging into their people issues, the team soon realized that they had not met their own standard of “Care for Our Team” – one of their core vValues – and quickly resolved to do a better job rolling out the missing process and data tools to everyone in the company.

The Entrepreneurial Operating System® provides the perfect framework for simplifying a business by giving everyone in the organization the same tools and a common language. Becoming your best as a leader means being an expert simplifier. Teaching your team to use the EOS Tools will accelerate your journey toward a simpler, more efficient, scalable organization.