Employees perform most of the activities that, if measured, are usually leading indicators of future outcomes. You can’t know how well your business is doing without understanding how well the people in your business are doing. When you spend more time focused on leading indicators you’ll spend less time (after the fact) pouring over income statements and analyzing trailing indicators.

Great managers are hard to find. Great managers have a true gift and a passion for getting the most out of people. Great managers possess a unique ability that is not in everyone. Having worked with hundreds of managers over the years, I now see clearly the ones who truly want to be great managers and the ones who are doing it for other reasons, e.g., ego, advancement, having nowhere else to go.

My client was mad. I could read the body language in the room, and it was not good. It was plain to see she’d been hurt deeply by some unspoken slight from one of her team members. The two of them were sitting there with their arms crossed, facing away from each other. The rest of the team was fidgeting or wriggling in their chairs and not looking at anyone.

It was obvious there was an elephant in the room that all seven of them knew about, but were refusing to acknowledge. Knowing that a healthy team is critical for our success, I called out the issue.

Rocks are just priorities — the 3 to 7 most important things you must accomplish in the next ninety days. Company rocks are priorities for the company, departmental rocks are priorities for your department, and individual rocks are priorities for you or another individual. As simple as that sounds, it’s easy to overcomplicate rocks.

There is no magic formula for what constitutes a rock— it’s simply a priority that will take longer than 7 days (those action items are To-Dos) and up to ninety days to complete.

Here are a few questions I get asked often in sessions, with corresponding answers.

If you’re like most small to medium sized entrepreneurial companies, you’ve probably tried to visually display how your company is structured or organized. So what’s the best way to do that – with an accountability chart or an organizational chart? What’s the difference?

Organizational charts are focused on who reports to who, but they they typically don’t address one of the major issues most companies struggle with: a lack of clarity around what the major functions of the organization are, and who is accountable for what.

Accountability charts provide clarity about who owns the major functions of an organization and identifies the primary roles and responsibilities for which they are accountable.