Carl Jung famously said, “You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”

As clear and simple as that statement is, I’ve seen hundreds of otherwise successful leaders behave as though it doesn’t apply. If you want to quickly kill your company’s culture, consider making that mistake yourself. 

If you want to guarantee that you and your leadership team will never achieve your vision, get comfortable using the following phrase over and over:

“Kind of.”

Trust me, nothing will kill your company (and maybe you) faster.

When a leadership team embarks on the journey to implement EOS® in their business, one of the first things they learn to do is run weekly Level 10 Meetings™. While some teams resist, most come to love them quite quickly. It’s not unusual for a team to see the quality and value of their meetings improve dramatically in a few short weeks.

After the leadership team masters this discipline, Level 10 Meetings are introduced throughout the company, one level at a time. That’s when I start getting one of the most common EOS questions:

“How can I make my people more engaged in our meetings?”

I recently spent the day with two groups of mid-managers, helping them become more comfortable with EOS®, improve their leadership and management skills, and create more accountability. Late in the day, while teaching five important disciplines used by great managers, we had some terrific dialog about providing feedback to employees. The group easily understood the importance of giving both positive and constructive feedback to employees, and about the need to do so quickly (within 24 hours). What they were struggling with was the “how.” In other words, how, exactly, do you give someone negative feedback that is CONstructive rather than DEstructive?

When one of my clients is working to strengthen the Process Component in their business, the ultimate goal is getting a handful of Core Processes documented, simplified and “FBA” – which stands for “followed by all.” Often, when recording a Rock or Goal on the whiteboard that includes “FBA,” I turn around to find one or more leaders looking at me skeptically.

“What’s FBA?” they’ll say, or “How is that a SMART Rock?”

Fair questions.