I’ve noticed a pattern this year across several good teams that have truly become great teams. Conversely, there are other teams that just remain mediocre. Why is that? It all comes down to having a great Integrator in place who owns their role.

In any entrepreneurial organization, two essential seats are the Visionary and the Integrator™. A great Visionary is driven by creativity and passion, which fuels his or her vision for the company. A great Integrator takes that vision and makes it happen throughout the organization. Without these two leaders working side by side, your company will never see the success it’s capable of achieving.

Two epidemics kill cultures: end runs and unresolved complaining. Both waste time and energy, and are ultimately toxic to the health and productivity of your company. Luckily, these epidemics can be cured by asking a simple, powerful question.

As we turn the final corner of 2017, many family-owned businesses are preparing to become more profitable in 2018. When I took the helm of our third-generation family business several years ago, I was eager to boost our profitability. But what I found was that there are a lot of profit-eaters in a family-owned business. And they can be very difficult to get rid of without a robust and objective operating system in place.

Want to have a more profitable family-owned business in 2018? Watch out for these profit-eaters!

In our first session with an EOS^® client, we help them implement an efficient, productive Meeting Pulse™ and weekly Level 10 Meeting™ that quickly improve the quality of the company’s meetings. One of the things we insist they do is rate each meeting – out loud– as it concludes.

“Rating your meetings” seems like such a simple concept that many fail to grasp its importance. Some even decide– early in the EOS journey– to make It optional or skip it altogether. If you’re one of those people – please read on. Because properly rating your meetings and using the feedback to make them better (and your team healthier) is a game changer.

The leaders of companies running on EOS^® learn to look at their business through the lens of the Six Key Components™ (as illustrated by the EOS Model™). This is important because the root cause of a company’s issues is weakness in the Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process or Traction Component™. Solving issues at the root (rather than treating symptoms) makes them go away forever.