Two workers in the Operations Department of a company were working one Friday evening to push out a late delivery. One saw a problem about to happen and said to the other, “Look at that! We can’t ship this out. This order is not correct.”

“You’re right,” said the other, “But neither one of us can fix it. Nobody can fix it until Monday. The boss told us to get this shipment out tonight, and we’ll get yelled at if we don’t. Remember what he did the last time something like this happened?”

So out the order went, and in came an angry customer complaint two days later when the order was delivered. And then out went a chunk of the profits from the order because it cost the company three times as much to fix the error than it would have to get it right the first time.

After your senior leadership team has mastered the Entrepreneurial Operating System^®, there comes an exciting – and maybe slightly scary – milestone in your implementation of EOS: it’s time to teach the rest of the company how to do it. We call this the “rollout,” and it begins when your leadership team works together to help next level leaders, managers and supervisors begin using EOS foundational tools in their departments or teams.

Whether you do your rollout to one layer of management at a time or to everyone all at once, there are a few things you can do to make sure the process goes as smoothly and successfully as possible.

When I was a leader in one of my own businesses early in my career, I had the misfortune to discover that my employees had nicknamed me “Hurricane.” It was NOT a compliment! 

Part of what earned me that nickname was the rage I felt when I had to repeat myself several times with my employees. I thought telling people something once should be enough! I hired really smart people, so when they didn’t seem to remember things I’d told them, I thought they just weren’t paying enough attention to what I said, and that made me furious.

When I start working with a new client, one of the first questions I ask is, “What is it that keeps you from being successful? What is it you must overcome for your business to grow?” Recently, someone answered that question with, “The voices inside my head.”

I knew instantly what he was talking about. I hear the voices, too – we all do. They say things like:

“I don’t have enough experience.”

“I’m not charismatic enough.”

“I’m not a good leader.” 

“My peers are all doing better than me. I must be broken.”

Running a business is a wild ride and there are a lot of surprises along the way. But I think the thing that surprises me most is that I have learned more about business and leadership in the last five years than I did in the previous 30 years.

This is part two in a two-part series of the five most surprising things about business that leadership teams need to learn. (You can read part one here.)