Chad Silverstein describes removing a valued employee from his leadership team because her role didn't fit the defined function. Instead of leaving, she used EOS practices to develop herself and earned her way back as a stronger leader.
Chapters
When I think about some of the cool stories that I have in my office about leadership, one definitely comes to mind that I love sharing. And it was when I decided to invest in eos. EOS is called Entrepreneur's Operating System. Entrepreneur Operating System. Gino Wickman has it. A lot of companies use it. You may be familiar with it. And we showed up at our first leadership meeting with our integrator, Alex Freytag, and I'll never forget this. So we show up and we did the accountability chart. And, you know, I had all my leaders around the table, and we put that accountability chart, basically a hierarchy chart for people who don't know what that is, an org chart. And we talked about the major functions of the business. So we had sales, we had finance, we had operations, we had legal, and we had a couple people in the room. One particular who ended up after we figured out what the major functions of the business are, which we had never done an exercise like that, and we started putting people in those boxes. There was someone there that didn't fit into one of our boxes. And what that means in the EOS world is that person's not on the leadership team. And this person was one of our best employees. They were the most, most loyal and dedicated employee. And I couldn't imagine running leadership meetings and not have them there with us. And so I kind of fought it internally for a little bit, but our integrator made it really clear that's just not how it works. And that person's back, better suited to be wherever they are in the business and not waste their time in a leadership meeting if they don't need to be there. So you can imagine how personal they took it. You can imagine how hard it was for everyone that was in the room, how awkward it felt. But the story gets so good because after we made the decision that this person wasn't going to be on the leadership team, and again, it was really hard for her, she stepped up and she did even more, which is so rare because most people, they're going to go be a victim and they're going to complain about it, and they're going to kind of sabotage in a weird way, even if they are a good employee. And she put her best foot forward. And to make a long story short, as we progressed and we bought into this EOS system and we started building this momentum and this traction and breaking through ceilings, she was focused and she was built to lead. She came to every practice. She came with her opus, she came with her core, she came with challenge. And I watched her transform herself by doing the hard work that so few people were willing to do. And over the course of the next few years, she earned her way back up onto the leadership team as some of the others went away, and to the point where she became one of the strongest built to lead leaders in our company. And so to see her kind of hit her rock bottom in a kind of a weird way at that time, when I guess you could say she was kicked off the leadership team, and to see her overcome that and to see her reaction to it and how she used built to lead as a catalyst to just keep going, keep working, and it was not easy for her. And so I just think back, and I just think about how inspired I was every day. And I loved showing up to practice and seeing her just go at it and stand up in front of the group and pop out her opus and to challenge the leaders. And she was just very inspiring. So I always think about that kind of timeline. Throughout the company's history, not many people were able to do that, so hopefully you enjoyed that.
