5 Critical Leadership Skills When Your Business Hits the Ceiling

When you’re stuck, it can leave you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. It happens when you, your department, or your company isn’t growing anymore. It also happens when you’re growing too fast and everyone is struggling to keep up.

This is a normal part of organizational growth—think of it as growing pains. In EOS, we call this Hitting the Ceiling.

Acknowledging when you’ve hit the ceiling is vital, because once you and your team have acknowledged it, it just becomes an issue that needs to be solved.

Many leadership teams ignore their issues or attack the surface problems when they’ve hit the ceiling. But great teams get to the root cause of why they’ve gotten stuck. These teams embrace the following five leadership abilities.

5 Critical Leadership Abilities to Break Through the Ceiling

Simplify

When it comes to running the business, have you intentionally simplified your communications, processes, structure, and vision? In EOS, mastering five simple tools will help you and your team to be expert simplifiers:

• Vision/Traction Organizer
• The Accountability Chart
• Rocks
• The Meeting Pulse
• Scorecard

Delegate

Do you wish there were more hours in the day to get it all done? Here’s a simple and powerful way to help you to free up time and delegate. Delegating not only gives you more freedom, but it also empowers you and your company to boost your effectiveness and reach new levels of performance and success.

Predict

Are you frustrated because you seem to be putting out fires all the time? Feel like you’re always in reaction mode? Use two simple tools to radically shift your team’s focus and energy from reactive to proactive:

• Rocks—agreeing on (and tracking) the 3 to 7 most important things to focus on in the next 90 days
• Level-10 Meetings—meeting weekly with your leadership team to get a pulse on the business, solve key issues, and hold each other accountable

Systemize

Are you frustrated with having to fix mistakes that should have never happened? Do you want your business to be easier to manage, more efficient, and profitable? The secret to success is consistency! Document, simplify, and get everyone in your company to follow your “way” of doing business.

Structure

Do you have the right people in the right seats to take your business to the next level? Take a big step back to see the big picture and decide the simplest, most effective way to structure your team to get to the next level.

When you’ve hit the ceiling, first acknowledge it, then dig to find the root cause of why you’re stuck, and finally use the tools above to break through the ceiling. When you do, your feelings of frustration and overwhelm will be greatly diminished.

Next Steps

• Download the EOS tools to equip your team to break through the ceiling
• Schedule a 90-Minute Meeting to learn more about how EOS can help you regain traction

This post originally appeared on the GPS for Small Businesses blog on March 9, 2016.