Recently, Gino Wickman and I were honored to be guests of Dan Sullivan on his very popular podcast, Inside Strategic Coach. For those of you who don't know Dan yet, he's helped thousands of entrepreneurs improve their businesses and their lives through his Strategic Coach program. Gino has been enrolled in Strategic Coach for nearly twenty years, and credits Dan and his program with helping clarify his vision, and conceive of and then work to build EOS Worldwide with our friend and partner, Don Tinney.

One of the most powerful EOS^® tools is the Accountability Chart. It’s powerful because it crystallizes the right structure and illustrates all available seats in your organization. In addition, it clarifies who reports to who and who is accountable for what.

All that said, it also illuminates the Visionary and Integrator roles sitting atop the major functions of your business. An organization has a Visionary about 50 percent of the time, and it must have an Integrator 100 percent of the time.

In an entrepreneurial company, the roles of Visionary and Integrator are an essential part of the organization, no matter how big or how small. The Visionary and the Integrator couldn’t be more different in terms of how they think and problem-solve. However, when their individual Unique Ability^® is correctly matched together and they are working toward the same business goals, the results can be exciting.

The Visionary entrepreneur’s passion, drive, and creativity are the key elements that help launch a business and fuel a company’s growth. But when a company is growing, the Visionary entrepreneur can start to feel swamped with the overwhelming workload, and their momentum begins to stall and sputter. Every great Visionary hits this threshold.

Creating the Accountability Chart with the help of an EOS^® Implementer helps leadership teams identify who is accountable for what, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the right people are in the right seats. Before you move people into new roles or start hiring new members of the team, you need to start by evaluating whether people GWC the seat – Get it, Want it and have the Capacity to do it.

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.