On your journey to becoming your best in business, you’ll need to make some tough people decisions. Usually those decisions revolve around Right People/Right Seat issues. In the EOS Process™ we use the People Analyzer™ with GWC™ (Get It/Want It/Capacity to Do It) to identify the root cause of a team’s specific people-related issues. The most common people issues are:

• Wrong Person/Right Seat – someone who doesn’t share the core values but is in the Right Seat.
• Right Person/Wrong Seat – a person who shares the core values but is in the Wrong Seat, i.e., they don’t get it, want it, or have the capacity to do it.

Sometimes the tough people decision is to fire an employee who doesn’t get it, want it, or have the capacity to do the job. One of my clients recently had to make that tough decision. Afterwards, the Visionary told me about the way the employee responded to being fired.

Do you know how many people are directly affected by the work you do? I ask leadership teams this question and they usually answer with the number of people they employ – 75 or 100 or 120.

“How about your vendors, employees’ families, and all your customers?” I ask. Some light bulbs start turning on, and they’ll guess a couple thousand.

Even a couple thousand is a low number. Your work and your team make a huge difference. A number of years ago, my team crunched some numbers and determined that the average company of 100 employees directly affects 10,000 people. This includes all of your staff, your families, your vendors and partners, your customers and their teams, and then all the work you do in the community.

I had a recent client session end with the team looking a little hangdog and expressing some disappointment. This was an EOS Vision Building™ 1 session, which includes getting the team’s Accountability Chart to about 90% complete and defining their Core Values.

When we dug into their disappointment, here’s what emerged:

• One team member was unhappy that in strengthening the Accountability Chart, they had surfaced a lot “Right Person/Right Seat” issues that needed to be solved.
• They were all unhappy that they were going to have to figure out how to make the Core Values they defined fit into the legacy Core Values imposed on them by their corporate parent.

So why were they disappointed?

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.

I was recently with the leadership team of a proud company that had a big challenge. They had been experiencing declining sales and profitability. The senior leadership team understood the gravity of their situation, but they couldn’t get the mid-level managers and the frontline employees to see a need to change day-to-day habits.

Like many companies, the culture of the organization had become stale. The employees had a lackadaisical, “So what?” kind of attitude: “So what if this order is not shipped on time? So what if the customer complains?”