“The roads of the world are paved with squirrels that couldn’t decide.”

This insight was shared by a fellow EOS^® Implementer at our quarterly gathering in Detroit in February. It paints a very clear mental picture, doesn’t it? The ability to make a decision is one of the characteristics of all great leaders. Some people are great at making decisions; others find it challenging.

Decisions exist on two levels – intellectual and emotional. Our intellect tells us we “should” do something — expand our business, resolve that personnel issue, refine our marketing plan, work fewer hours, reduce overhead.

I have a client with two brothers on the leadership team, who disagreed about how to handle employee-challenge situations. The company has three locations with multiple shifts. Frustrations among midlevel managers were brewing when one of the leaders came across as harsh and cold over something that others considered to be a small issue. The trouble was that the leader didn't have an awareness of how his actions affected the midlevel managers. They were frustrated, hurt, and demotivated by this repetitive behavior.

Do your employees know what a Level 10 Meeting is? At all levels of your company? If you’re running your company on EOS®, your leadership team should know what a Level 10 Meeting™ is and your entire organization should be engaged in regular Level 10 Meetings every week.

However, in our experience, most companies fail at pushing the Level 10 Meeting Agenda down to the rest of the organization. Employees are still stuck in meetings that suck – and this is sucking the life out of your company.

How well do you swim? By “swim,” I actually mean “network.”

When business leaders network to meet new clients, they have a tendency to spend a lot of time and effort on it. In the end, many of them wonder what results they're getting from all the effort. Unless you focus on target market networking, you won’t get the results you're hoping for.

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.