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.

One of the transformations that happens to companies when they implement EOS^® is that they create a leadership team that trusts each other. Often, before EOS, company leaders spend lots of time in unnecessary meetings updating each other on commitments they have made to each other or on the progress of the functional group they lead for the company.

Annual planning season is upon us. This is the time of year that many of my clients have their two-day offsite annual planning sessions. It’s their opportunity to reflect on last year’s successes and misses, as well as getting clear on where to focus their time, energy, and resources over the coming year.

In a recent annual planning session with a financial services company, the six-person leadership team had an a-ha moment. They are all very polite, friendly people who are hard workers, but they didn’t fully trust each other. They trusted each other to do their jobs and get stuff done, but they didn’t have a vulnerability-based trust. What does this mean?

I think we could all agree that being open and honest is important in our personal lives. Our friends and our family members value it, and it helps us build relationships and establish trust with the people we care about.

And much like our personal lives, being open and honest can have a strong impact on the people in our professional lives, such as our employees, our customers, and our community.

I have already discussed how being open and honest builds the foundation of your business. Openness and honesty are used to communicate your business’s Core Values, and provide a list of expectations your employees live by.

But in addition to building a foundation, being open and honest plays a fundamental role in helping us resolve issues.

Have you ever struggled with letting someone else do something that you can do faster, better, and with less effort? If you really think it through, you know that if you don’t pass the task on, you'll be doing it yourself forever.

If this task is in fact the best use of your time, then maybe the staff member isn’t needed. But if there's a better use of your time, then you have delegate it to someone else who will do it slower, not quite as good, and with more effort. You have to let go of the vine*.

How much of your week is spent doing these types of tasks?