Leading, managing, and holding people accountable are major roles of anyone who has people reporting to them on the Accountability Chart™. These roles create numerous opportunities to engage with your direct reports. One of my favorite opportunities is the Quarterly Conversation™. I think of it as an employee feedback program.

Here is a sample process to have that conversation:

First is Preparation

• Schedule your conversation well in advance

• Pick a place off-site, informal and away from the office

• Complete the People Analyzer™ on your direct report

• Ask your direct report to complete the People Analyzer™ as a self-assessment

• Prepare for and keep notes during the conversation

• Begin the conversation with context . . .

• This is NOT a performance review

• Keeping expectations clear – Two-Way Street

• Communicating well – 80/20 rule

• Improving our relationship

• Helping us BOTH get better

 There are four parts to the Conversation

1. What’s Working – Ask them how they feel they’re doing. Then, give them some positive feedback. (TSP: Truthful, Specific, Positive)

2. What’s Not Working – Ask them what they feel isn’t going well or could be improved. Then, give some helpful improving suggestions.

3. Next steps – Ask them what they will do to improve, and how they feel you can help. Be careful not to take their “monkey”.

4. Feedback – Ask them how they feel YOU ARE doing as their boss – areas where you could improve. Then, share with them how you feel you’re doing and how they could help you.

There are three common issues that will surface from Quarterly Conversations™:

1. Ones that CANNOT BE solved. Your direct report just wants to be heard and acknowledged.

2. Ones YOU must solve. You are the only one with the authority to address it.

3. Ones THEY must solve. Push their issues back to them. Especially when the “monkey” belongs to them.

Quarterly Conversations™ is one of the many tools used in EOS^® to help business leaders become great bosses. For many, this is an entirely new and foreign discipline. But once it is mastered, it keeps direct reports engaged in their role and on the same page with their manager. They feel like they are part of a team, and they know how to help the company succeed.

Holding Quarterly Conversations™ is a great way to ensure that you and each of your direct reports have clear expectations, understand what is on each other’s minds, and are not operating on assumptions.

I would be happy to talk with you further about EOS^® and the benefits of Quarterly Conversations™. Please fill out the consult form below to request a free, 15-minute phone consultation with me. I look forward to helping you implement this important quarterly practice that will improve both your employee relationships and your company’s performance.

EOS^® is a management system for entrepreneurial organizations, and implementing EOS^® is a process. It generally takes two years to implement the EOSModel™ through all levels of an organization, starting of course with the Leadership Team. Implementing EOS^® is not equivalent to attending a workshop where you learn excellent content, which you may or may not use when you return to your company.

The organizations that receive the intended value from EOS^® are those that internalize every aspect of EOS^® and come to understand the nuances. How do organizations make that happen? They appreciate that they are changing organizational behavior, thinking about their organizations in new ways, learning new skills — and all of that takes time.

How much time? I can’t tell you how much time. There is no specific date to which a Leadership Team can point and say “Aha, we have operationalized EOS^®.” It doesn’t work that way.

Implementing EOS^® isn’t an event. It is an accumulation of lots and lots of little things that alone seems innocuous and perhaps even useless. It’s practicing these little things over and over and over again. And some days, leaders will lose their focus and forget to practice something. And other days they may not use a tool as intended. That’s okay — their EOS Implementer™ will get them back on track.

EOS^® isn’t something a Leadership Team “does” five days each year during their Quarterly Pulsing™ Sessions and their Two-Day Annual Planning Session. It’s  adopting EOS^® as a way of life — it is how leaders manage their companies every single day.

It is how Leadership Teams become aligned to one voice, one vision, and one team.

As an EOS^® Implementer, my job is to help you  incorporate EOS^® into your organization so its processes become second nature to you and your Leadership Team. I would be happy to talk you through this process and answer any questions you have about EOS^®. Please use the consult form below to request a free 15-minute phone conversation with me. As an EOS^® Implementer, I’ll be by your side through the process until EOS^® becomes your company’s way of life.

Oh, and don’t forget To-Do’s. Just about every Leadership Team with whom I work gets flustered managing their goals, rocks, issues and to-do’s.

It is not uncommon for me to receive an email asking what the team should do with the seven new ideas they had, or the three new opportunities on the horizon. Or perhaps the question is about a to-do that took two weeks to complete, rather than one.

The question here is usually, “Should we make that to-do a Rock?” Sometimes a Leadership Team will feel overwhelmed by the number of issues they identify and do not have adequate time to IDS all of them within the quarter.

The first answer to all the questions is to Simplify, one of the leadership abilities we teach during Focus Day™. The second answer is Compartmentalize™.

Compartmentalizing means having a place for every idea, issue, opportunity, project, goal, priority, etc. that arises in an organization.

Everything that takes longer than 90 days belongs on your V/TO™:

• Any idea, opportunity, project, etc. that must be accomplished this year becomes a goal.
• Items that must get done this quarter and will take several weeks to accomplish become a Rock.
• Issues the team does not need to address during the current quarter (90 days) are recorded on the Issues list portion of the V/TO™.

Everything that takes less than 90 days belongs on your Level 10 Meeting™ Agenda:

• Add any Issues that come up during the quarter and must be solved now to the IDS section of the agenda.
• Delegate Issues that are best solved by a department to the respective departmental Level 10 Meeting™ Agenda.
• Add anything that can be accomplished in one or two weeks to the To-Do List section of the agenda.

The bottom line here is that you can keep track of your issues, ideas, opportunities, and projects on two EOS^®tools – the V/TO™ and the Level 10 Meeting™ Agenda. What could be simpler than that?

EOS^®works because it brings simplicity and organization to all of the moving parts of your business. The systems, tools, and foundation offered through a management system like EOS^®saves you time, aggravation and money.

I would love the opportunity to talk with you about EOS^®’ ability to simplify some very complicated processes. As a business owner who used EOS^®in my former company, I’m a testimony to the difference EOS^®can make in a business.

Please fill out the contact form below to request a no-obligation phone consultation with me.  I’m confident that using EOS^®’ many tools and processes will bring some direction to your journey and take all the scary surprises out of your road to success.

I have written a number of blogs about having the Right People in the Right Seats in your company.

As you recall, Right People are the people who share your Core Values. They understand your company culture and they practice and exhibit your company’s Core Values throughout the day. Right People are the folks who understand their seat on your Accountability Chart™ and how their seat contributes to the company’s work. In other words, they “get it”, they “want it”, and they “have the capability” to be a rock star in their seat.

Once a company discovers their Core Values, they need to hire, review, reward, promote, and fire based on those Core Values. A question I’m frequently asked is how do you hire for Core Values?

My answer to a Leadership Team is that they need to get together and identify what interview questions will demonstrate if a prospective employee shares their culture. The questions can then be used regardless of what seat a company is filling. So where do you start? Here are some considerations:

• Identify a question for each Core Value. If you have 5 Core Values, that’s 5 questions.
• Ask behavior-oriented questions – they usually begin with a statement, i.e.: Tell me about a time when . . .
• Customize the question by introducing an activity specific to the Core Value, i.e.: . . . when you had to manage an irate customer.
• You can also add filters to increase the difficulty of the question, for example . . . and you thought the customer was unreasonable in their expectation.
• Listen for answers that downplay the importance of your question, or if the individual doesn’t really address your question, or if they are defensive about how they responded to an example they are sharing.
• You may even want to identify what an interviewer should “listen for” when asking each question.

It is far better to determine an applicant is not the Right Person for your company prior to adding them to the team. Creating the questions takes some time; however, you will save time, avoid or at least mitigate issues at a later time, and make everyone’s job easier because you now have the Right Person in the Right Seat.

If you’d like to learn more about hiring the Right Person for the Right Seat or need a jump-start in writing these questions, please fill out the consult form below to request a free, 15-minute phone consultation with me. I experienced the effectiveness of EOS^®when I implemented it in my former company years ago. I know first hand it’s a process that works when you commit to the journey. I look forward to talking with you about EOS^®, your company’s Core Values, and the importance of getting the Right People in the Right Seats.

It is common for growth-minded companies to focus on the straightaways to their goal. What do I mean by “straightaways”? I think of straightaways as a company’s desire to get from point A to point B — for example, from $2.8 million annual gross revenue to $5 million, from one location to three locations, etc. And then saying, “Go”.

Focusing on the straightaway has us moving as quickly as possible to achieve the growth we desire. In all likelihood, that will not get us to the outcome we want for our companies. What will get us there is creating a pathway that identifies and tracks the steps it takes to get from point A to point B.

Think of these steps as the loading and unloading zones delivery trucks follow. The local office supply store may make 50 deliveries in a single day. If all the driver knows is that there are a lot of boxes to deliver, he or she will simply pile all the boxes into the truck and drive as fast as possible for eight hours. And the deliveries may not be made. There is a possibility that not all the boxes for each customer will be delivered, or perhaps the driver will pass a customer’s location and have to return later in the day. And there is a real chance the driver will return to the warehouse and discover the seven boxes for one customer remain in the back of the truck – oops!

If, on the other hand, the office supply store focuses on the unloading zones and creates a process for making 50 deliveries in one day — i.e. defining the geographical order for the deliveries, equipping each truck with a GPS unit, entering addresses into those GPS units, and providing the driver a checklist to track the deliveries and monitor the system — those 50 deliveries may take only five hours. This leaves additional time to delight more customers and creates the desired outcome of increased annual gross revenue.

In the world of EOS^®, we call those unloading zones Core Processes – the sequence of events that enable people in a business to do what they do. Core Processes establish rules, guidelines and expectations that your Leadership Team and employees follow. Once you identify your Core Processes, the appropriate manager documents the details in a simple, high-level bulleted list using the 80/20 rule.

The 80/20 rule is documenting the 20 percent of the processes that produce 80 percent of the results. It ensures you keep things simple and only cover the basic steps that your employees can easily understand and follow. After you’ve trained your employees on your Core Processes, you can implement unloading zones throughout your company.

I welcome the opportunity to talk with you further about EOS^®’s Core Processes and how establishing unloading zones in your company can make your business run more efficiently. If you’d like some one-on-one time discussing your particular situation, please fill out the consult form below to request a free, 15-minute phone call with me. I’m confident that establishing Core Processes in your company will result in effective systems that will grow your business.