One of the first things an EOS Implementer™ does when working with clients is to determine the right structure for the organization using the Accountability Chart. While this can be a straightforward exercise for your senior leadership team, some of your team members may have difficulty when it's time to build out the Accountability Chart for their own departments.
Here are a few tips to help you navigate this process with your team.
Do you ever get frustrated with people on your leadership team while solving problems or brainstorming ideas? They may ask too many questions, jump to conclusions too fast, are too quiet, or are always a pessimist. Do you sometimes wish they all had your “MO” when discussing these things? Wouldn’t that be great? Or would it?
You might think it’s best to have all optimists on your leadership team or that it might be best to have all innovators or all realists, when in reality, my experience, after having observed almost 100 leadership teams identify, discuss, and solve issues, is that you’ll actually benefit by having a balance of all types.
The most common challenge leadership teams encounter as they learn to IDS™ (Identify, Discuss, Solve) issues is that they move straight to discussion without identifying the root cause of the issue. There is only one difficulty with that approach – the issue is merely a symptom of what is truly happening. If you start discussing right away, you will most likely solve the wrong issue.
For most companies, this question doesn’t have an easy answer, but it’s usually something like this: “I guess pretty good? My team seems to like me.” Over the years, I have heard versions of this answer many times – but only from companies not running on EOS®! It’s scary how many things are wrong with that answer, not least of which is the belief that being liked is an indication of strong leadership and management skills. These leaders and managers clearly don’t have a way to measure how they are doing.
With a company running on EOS, the answer is completely different.
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.
