A helpful discipline when giving feedback to someone, or when having a tough conversation to help correct someone’s unproductive actions, is sharing three data points. Data points are examples of what the person is doing that demonstrates the bad behavior.

If you have to confront one of your people for bad behavior – let’s say he or she is treating people in the office poorly – you owe that person three examples. There is truly magic in three. Two is not enough and four is too many.

When something good or bad happens, or when we have an idea, we want to share it. When we have a question, we want to ask it. When we are frustrated, we want to vent.

Sharing our news, ideas, questions and frustrations whenever the urge strikes, consumes an incalculable amount of time and human energy, and that matters because many of us say we don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want to accomplish.

When helping an entrepreneurial leadership team clarify, simplify, and achieve its Vision, we use a tool called the V/TO™ (Vision/Traction Organizer™). This EOS Foundational Tool™ contains eight questions, and our job as EOS Implementers™ is to get every member of the leadership team to agree on every word of the answers to each of those questions.

When there’s weakness in the Vision component of your organization, it’s not that there’s no Vision. Often there’s too much Vision – you don’t all agree.

After a full and productive Annual Season with my clients, I’m always left reflecting on some common themes. This year, what resonated most was the relationship between members of a leadership team and a company’s Issues List. That reflection led me to a question every leader should ask:

"What verb describes how I most frequently impact our company’s Issues List?"

Over the last 10 years, I’ve helped more than one hundred leadership teams implement the Entrepreneurial Operating System® in their companies. These entrepreneurs and teams all came to me for one simple reason – they weren’t getting what they wanted from their businesses. In our journey to clarify, simplify and achieve a company’s Vision, I’ve found that 80 percent of the time, one or more people change on the leadership team within the first two years.