Do you want any of these for your business in the coming year? Peace of mind. Consistency. Efficiency. Scalability. More Fun. And of course, more profit. Every leadership team that I’ve worked with seems to have an instant eagerness to improve upon these areas in their business, regardless of industry.

The key to achieving these goals in the new year is a three-step exercise of identifying, documenting, and following your company’s Core Processes. It’s not a sexy solution, but it’s incredibly powerful. And it’s not as painful as you might think.

After a client's recent EOS session, an owner of the company made a comment about the importance of repetition in mastering a skill. Specifically, he was talking about the weekly Level 10 meeting and, after just six meetings, how much better his team was becoming at identifying, discussing and solving issues, getting things done, improving communication and team health. He told his team, “Imagine how much better we’ll be after 52 weekly Level 10 meetings?”

If you’re like most bosses, you do most of the talking. Frankly, this one-way-street behavior needs to change. Your job is to ensure that the dialogue is 80/20, where your direct report is doing 80% of the talking and you’re talking only 20% of the time. The only way to make that happen is to ask questions instead of making statements.

Something that is surprisingly difficult in business is having a true functioning team. In his book The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni articulates four disciplines that are necessary to achieve organizational health. Discipline 1 is to build a cohesive leadership team. He poses the question of whether a group of leaders is a "team" or a "working group."

You may ask, what's the difference?

It appears as if Greg McKeown has written a book for business owners and leaders who run their business on EOS – the Entrepreneurial Operating System. One of the basic tenants of EOS is that less is more, that you have to go slow to go fast. Focus, focus, focus. Single point accountability. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less meshes perfectly with these concepts.