Congratulations! You’ve documented your company’s core processes. It’s a big undertaking for teams to simplify and document their processes. The next step is to roll them out to everyone in the company and get them followed by all. But how do you do that?

“It’s consistency, not smiles that keep customers coming back.”

Well-documented processes, that are followed by all, ensure consistency for your customers and scalability of your business. However, it’s one thing to document a process but another thing entirely to have it followed by all. Embracing something new, such as a process, doesn’t come easily to people. If you’ve invested time, money and resources to implement a new reporting process to manage workflow and information, you probably know what I mean. Usually, just over half of the employees are using it a year later. Why?

How does a company successfully transition from one generation to the next? For many teams, just the term “succession planning” can be overwhelming. All the details of buying/selling and ownership transition are daunting, but beyond all that is one question plaguing business owners: "Even if we had all the legal details worked out, how does my business practically transition to the new ownership so that I can step away?"

Here’s the story of one team that successfully transitioned to new ownership within the EOS Process™.

In his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith points out that the fundamental beliefs that drive our success can also make us resistant to change. We overestimate our contributions and sometimes take credit for things that others have accomplished while often ignoring our own shortcomings. These delusions are the result of success, not failure.

A few years ago, one of my clients was planning to step down as CEO within a couple of years and wanted to appoint his successor from inside the company. What made this tricky was that there wasn't a single, obvious candidate. Recognizing that whomever he chose would need some time to grow into the role, he wanted to get an early start. The first step was finding out who was interested and how the rest of the team felt about them.

Rather than bury this issue in a series of secretive one-on-one conversations, he asked his team a simple question: “Who among you is interested in becoming our next CEO?” Three hands went up. What happened next was remarkable.