One of the first things a company implementing EOS does is clearly define what it expects from its employees. They discover three to seven Core Values that define the organization’s culture, and they clearly define everyone’s roles and responsibilities. Those that consistently exhibit the Core Values and excel in their clearly defined roles are “Right People in the Right Seat.”
Over the last 11 years I have had my business, Nexus, I have probably said this phrase, “Good people in a bad system look like bad people” 300 times (if you are one of my big math people that is just about once every two weeks). The impetus of the saying goes back to the first year of Nexus when I was working with a local client.
The toughest part of any organization is leading and managing its people. Leadership is the more strategic, “thinking” part of the job — setting a clear direction, long-term planning, etc. Management is more about execution — the “doing” part of the job — setting expectations, communicating, coordinating, etc. A manager needs to be a coach, or a “Manacoach” as my colleague Kevin Armstrong calls it.
Over the years, I have seen several examples of managers who were so good that I believe they could manage almost anything. They just know how to manage people. They don’t need great technical skills in their field because they know if they get the right people in the right seats, the skills will be there.
But what does trust really imply? Here Patrick Lencioni, best-selling author, consultant and expert on building winning teams, discusses the importance of trust and the difference between predictive trust and vulnerability-based trust within a company.
When we first met, one of my clients was struggling with significant turnover. They had been operating with the mentality of hiring fast and firing fast. Whenever they had an opening, they hired as fast as they could to fill the void. After all, they had customer orders to fulfill and they needed people in place to do it. The problem was that not everyone was the right person for their company—they really didn’t share the company core values or fit into the culture.
