A guide to implementing EOS in your company that argues you should start by building vision before creating accountability charts. The speaker shares practical advice for CEOs on setting goals, structuring teams, and building trust using EOS tools.
This is an unofficial EOS success guide. We are not licensed by or endorsed by the entrepreneurial operating systems creators, EOS worldwide. We're just a fan of anything that helps CEOs and leaders and individuals and companies perform better. And we help a lot of companies get these tools in place. Here's what we've seen from helping those companies and implementing EOs in our own company. One of the areas I see people get stuck is when they start with the accountability chart. It sometimes produces a lot of different mental blocks and or it can create these massive organizational structures that aren't really appropriate. Or it can also just create a lot of emotional friction as we look at some people that subconsciously we may know aren't really in the right seat, but we don't really have a way to, to pull our ego out of it. And so maybe it's we're worried about firing somebody that's been with us a long time that we know needs to go or talking to someone about the seat we really think they should be in. These things can all hang you up. And one way to get away from that hang up is to start with your vision. Now We've got a 10 minute AI powered vision template that makes it very easy to fill out the vision components of your VTO and then a similar exercise for defining your actionable core values. It asks you 12 questions that take five minutes to answer. They're actually very fun to answer is what we hear from CEOs and leaders. And then it will produce a draft for you of your why, your what, your reason for being, your purpose. And you can review those, edit them very quickly and boom, in about 10 minutes you have a world class statement of your vision, your core purpose, all of those elements. And even if you want to take that to an all day session to work on, you're not starting anymore from zero. And you have the confidence that it really aligns. You've really thought through your cash positions, your growth, your customers, all these things that sound like a lot to think through, but it's just so easy when you're filling out and answering these questions. It's going to give you a strong sense of why and a strong sense of motivation to get to the next part of the exercise. It's also going to give you the context to have meaningful conversations about your new accountability chart. Once you create it, it helps get past that cognitive dissonance of how am I going to have a productive conversation with somebody I'm not maybe ready to fire, but I want to give Them the chance to succeed here, getting your vision in place first can really help that. So that's one of the things I've seen really accelerate self implementing a business operating system, specifically eos. All right, so there's a couple of other tips now, Rox, When I've spoken with a lot of my friends who are EOS implementers, this is an area where EOS really tends more towards saying, hey, go ahead and set up all these rocks and develop your skills at setting targets and meeting them. That's really where they focus. I find it very helpful to save companies from themselves because most companies, and particularly visionaries, will create way too many rocks. And what you essentially do when you let everybody contribute three to five rocks across an organization, that can be as many as 35 rocks for a company. And what happens is you end up with these complex cascades of rocks. And every individual has their own rocks and every department has their own rocks. And this has been shown again and again and again to engender silos and to set people up for failure. So what we found to work best is focus on one or two at most annual goals and attach action at most three rocks to each of those. For most of the rest of what you're putting in place, it will usually fit into the milestones to help achieve those rocks. Now what this does is it actually allows you to defeat the tendency towards silos that come with organizing on charts, like accountability charts and org charts, which were really designed for siloed organizations. The word department means separation. And the idea of a corporate silo is to section off each function in a company so that it's walled off from every other one. And they, they have minimal communication. And that was great when it was invented in the 1920s, but it sucks for companies that have to deal with the amount of change we have today. And so the way that we found it's really helpful to mitigate that is just keep things focused on a very small, small number of rocks, a very small number of one year goals, and then let the milestones help you distribute how everybody's pitching in on those. And that creates much more of a shared foundation so that you're still using rocks, you can still stay EOS pure if that's important to you. A long list of priorities isn't a list of priorities, it's a wish list. Priority means one. So when you start to cascade that one thing out into multiple things, then you try to engineer it, you end up with a glorified Gantt chart and a grant chart. If you've ever seen it. That's like in projects, you have like all these expanding fingers that look like a family tree or something. And those things are very fragile, they break, they become very complicated. Whereas if you just keep everybody focused on the same small set of rocks, the milestones that support those rocks, it's much easier to tell a story about how you as a team are coming together to work together to achieve your goals, to achieve your vision. And I promise, promise, promise you'll see great results and you won't have to violate anything that makes you not EOS pure. Another tip. If you're self implementing or even working with a professional implementer for getting EOS deeper in your organization, use a one on one template for a weekly meeting with your team. And if you're using Result Maps, we have that exact template. It integrates with your level 10s, it integrates with your quarterlies, it everything is using the same set of tools. But whatever tool you use, get this one on one cadence, where you're using the EOS foundational tools, where you're continually talking about and reinforcing the measurables, the rocks, how to surface issues. You're working with your team on raising the issues. It's also going to give you visibility so you can surface those issues in your respective level tents. And it just helps everyone get over this big scary thing of EOS and realize that, hey, these are pretty sound business principles. I may need to learn a little bit about the semantics that we're using if I just understand these principles. They're just a slightly refined way to think about the job I do. And now they're giving me a language and a set of tools to use to communicate, create visibility and solve problems and make decisions better. You can do that and get that understanding for everyone on your team just by getting some one on ones on the books. We recommend 30 minutes with everybody who reports to you every week. A lot of people push back, but here's what happens with our customers and clients that do this. They cut out every other meeting if it's not a level 10, if it's not a one on one, it ain't happening in their company unless there's a specific project work session that's going on. By the way, if you're in Result Maps, you can run those in the exact same format as a level 10, even if it's for a project. These habits help everybody lean in and learn and they're just good management. That kind of clarity, you're creating that regular cadence you're going to build more trust. You're going to create the consistency. You need to build trust. Because remember, Trust is time plus consistency. Try it out for 90 days, see if it doesn't accelerate your path dramatically and deepen the way your company can work together and accelerate the results you're able to get.
