Tag: eos mastery

EOS® for Finance: Developing Financial Literacy in Your Organization
By Scott

EOS® for Finance: Developing Financial Literacy in Your Organization

This is a note especially for those in the Finance seat.

Remember when we did the cash flow drivers tool?

In my experience, half of my teams roll their eyes like they don’t need it. I can only think of one team who told me there was no/little value in the activity.

My questions to you:

  • What is the financial literacy of your leaders?
  • What do you do every year and/or with every new hire to continue to build it?

In a past role, I spent five months of my life taking leadership teams through a financial literacy/cash flow activity. It was an 8-hour class, averaging 15 people per class, and I trained over 1,500 people across the US and Mexico. I will never forget when a plant manager told me, in an excited voice, that he finally understood EBITDA! The irony was that was a key metric in his bonus, and he did not really understand it. That experience taught me never to assume financial literacy and how it is such critical knowledge for the front-line leaders to possess so they can understand the CFO and make great business decisions.

Question for 2020: How are you assessing/building financial literacy in your leaders?

I encourage you to do the 8 cash flow drivers with your leaders and find other ways to repeat that learning event in creative ways. I would be glad to help co-facilitate it if that would help, and I have a few other ideas that I have seen work if you are interested.

Extra Tips:

EOS® for Visionaries & Integrators: Tips for Planning a Great Annual
By Scott

EOS® for Visionaries & Integrators: Tips for Planning a Great Annual

As we approach year end, it’s a good time to think about your 2-day annual planning. Here are a couple of tips based on feedback from my EOS partners:

  1. Get out of town: I consistently hear great feedback from teams when they do an overnight, even if it is just from Holland to Grand Rapids or Grand Rapids to Holland – they like being away and relaxing together.
  2. Plan some fun: Do something together that is just relaxing and creates some stories. One team went to Chicago and saw two plays – the first on night 1 and another after they finished day 2. Whether it is a comedy club, feather racing at a local pub, fishing/skiing, or just a nice dinner together, do something fun. This planning can also be delegated because every team has a person with the unique ability of planning fun.

It will be on the agenda for our quarterly, and I encourage you to sell it to your team and get them excited about it. I am here to serve, so let me know how I can help.

Extra Tips
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By Scott

EOS® for Everyone: “Once you stop learning, you start dying.”

Albert Einstein famously said this, and it is particularly meaningful for the message I want to pass on to EOS leaders. Your #1 goal is learning.

The target market leader that thrives in EOS is entrepreneurial, growth minded, and open minded. Growth minded is simply someone who wants to be their best, and becoming their best means they are hungry for learning. A key part of this is demonstrating vulnerability-based trust by acknowledging when you don’t know something.

To be open and honest with you – I have not been great about pushing the reading list as part of implementing EOS. My mental excuse is that I see you being so busy that I have held back. But reflecting on this decision, I have let some of you who are not hungry enough to ‘be your best’ off the hook and for those of you who are hungry to learn, I have not helped you with key books that will deepen your knowledge of and skill in using the key EOS tools. As I take on new clients, that is no longer the case!

Here are the books that allow you to take a deeper dive into key EOS topic areas:

I also have some resources specifically around delegation, career development, overcoming loss, managing negative talk (in your head), managing conflict, effective communication, and lean thinking. Please contact me if you have a learning need.

I have watched with great joy the hunger for learning how to lead to growth which has allowed leaders to increase their own capacity (GWC) in their role to meet the needs of a growing organization.

I have also seen the effects of just working hard and not focusing on increasing knowledge and skills through learning. The impact of that is more subtle, but the result is leadership in a seat that becomes less proactive and more reactive.

One of the EOS values is Grow or Die, and I am constantly challenged by an amazing group of people to do this – you. My ability to be effective in my role requires me to get smarter faster so that I can effectively assist in handling some difficult situations. It is why I get on a call with 24-36 implementers every Monday to gather/share wisdom, why I read, and why I continue to do some non-EOS work to gather experience that makes me more effective for you.

Are you purposefully growing or stagnating?

Here are three things you can do today to start growing:

  1. Read How To Be A Great Boss again and commit to getting to all Yes answers.
  2. Start reading one list from the book and commit to completing the reading list this year.
  3. Set up a 30-60 minute call with me and let’s customize a plan based on where you are and where you want to go.
EOS® for Sales: Your Sales Process
By Scott

EOS® for Sales: Your Sales Process

This is a note especially for those in the Sales seat.

My rock this quarter was to implement Pipedrive – a CRM tool – so I have been thinking a lot about the Sales seat I sit in on my own accountability chart.

EOS tries to keep this simple for you as the Sales leader by giving you two basic tools to help you focus your energy and build a more sales-focused ‘organization’ to support your work:

  • Tool #1 – Sales Department Check-up (p. 36 of your leadership team manual): This one-page checklist defines all of the most critical pieces of a healthy and effective sales organization. It is simple – read the statement and check the box if that is in place and SBA or FBA. A more effective way to use this is to get input from your Integrator and/or sales team on each item. Any non-checked boxes or disagreements are issues that need to be resolved.
  • Tool #2: Defining your sales process and measurables that need to be tracked to help you see what needs to happen. My story on this was a recent period of time where Emily (my admin lead) and I had not had an L10 in 4 weeks. During an L10 we did an IDS on the pipeline by opening my CRM and reviewing all the companies in the pipeline that were new and all of my clients that were in Mastery Journey pipeline (where all of you are that have completed the VB2 session). This helped us look at every client and decide what needed to happen to keep the experience on track and/or move them in/out of the pipeline. It took 20 minutes, but the result was a new closed deal and 2 scheduled 90-Minute Meetings. It also highlighted that my measurables need to be more defined so I can see the health of the process without having to take a deep dive on it.

I see too many sales leaders trying to keep the sales process hidden or vague, whether on purpose or because you don’t GWC that part of your role. I have only met a few sales leaders who possessed the unique ability to define and implement a sales process. If this is not your unique ability, get some help! When this critical work gets done, it provides the opportunity to build a sales organization where everyone is working on sales. This allows you to focus your unique abilities on the pieces you do well and delegate much of the other work.

Tips for building your sales process: I have designed and delivered a workshop that takes 45-60 minutes per process to arrive at a draft definition, and another 30 minutes to draft measurables. I would be glad to demonstrate it to you if it would help you strengthen this key component in your organization. Get in touch if you would be interested in exploring this option.

EOS® for Visionaries & Integrators: The Big 3 – Core Processes / Measurables / Same Page Meeting
By Scott

EOS® for Visionaries & Integrators: The Big 3 – Core Processes / Measurables / Same Page Meeting

Managing chaos is hard.

In working with entrepreneurial leaders and leadership teams, the word ‘chaos’ is often touted as ‘whatever it takes’ or ‘do the right thing’ or ‘act like a superhero’. If you think these sound like values, you are correct. My reason for sharing it is NOT to encourage you to disregard your values.

Let me take you back to your 90-Minute Meeting and repeat what I said about strengthening your Process component: “Your handful of core processes define your business model. These are the key things that need to be executed on every day, and if that is done your business will become more profitable, more manageable, and honestly more FUN to lead.”

For Visionaries:
A defined process tells you where the organization needs you to contribute and also tells you what to expect the organization to do when you move on to the next thing. It also gives you measurables that allow you to watch the progress and health of the organization without having to dive in the details.

For Integrators:
Processes help all of your leaders see what they are accountable for and allows you to delegate and focus your energy on helping them get unstuck when things stop working. They also help you manage the tension between groups that might see a process differently. Have you ever heard sales pushing for closing a deal and operations arguing about design or deliverables as not being realistic?

Defining core processes and measurables are part of the big 3 because strengthening these will provide a host of benefits to your organization. I have seen six-figure cost (and profit) impacts as well as leaders saying “I finally understand what my job is.” I have also seen RP/RS issues when a leader cannot demonstrate the GWC of their role by defining and implementing a core process. When an organization fixes that, things like growth and diversification start happening.

Finally, don’t forget the same page meeting. Maybe a good topic for your next one is to spend some time thinking about your process component.

Tips to get started: I have designed and delivered a workshop that takes 45-60 minutes per process to arrive at a draft definition, and another 30 minutes to draft measurables. I would be glad to demonstrate it to you if it would help you strengthen this key component in your organization. Get in touch if you would like to explore this option.

Resources launched for you

If you need extra support, take a look at these three guided journeys I’ve developed to help coach leaders to success in some of the fundamentals:

  • Onboarding
  • Implementing a clarity break
  • Getting to know your team (I call it People-Centered 101)
Bookmark this page and enroll when needed…
EOS® for Human Resources: Development & Onboarding
By Scott

EOS® for Human Resources: Development & Onboarding

This is a note especially for those in the HR Seat.

The two things I see the team needing you to own are: the development of new leaders and helping to onboard new leaders.

Here are a couple of tips for how to do this:

  1. Leadership + Management = Accountability (LMA): The book How To Be A Great Boss outlines the 10 key things people need to do to become a great leader AND a great manager. There are lots of things you could do to equip your leaders, but using these 10 is what we recommend. If you are looking for someone to help you think through how to translate these into a series of learning events in your organization or more of a program, I would be glad to help.** At a minimum, make this book required reading for all leaders.
  2. Onboarding: Studies have shown that 58% of new leaders hired into an organization fail within 18 months. In my experience, the simple act of creating an onboarding program for new leaders for the first 6 to 12 months can greatly increase your odds of success. Here is a recent post I created to outline what great onboarding looks like, and a guided experience you can sign up for that will give you weekly reminders of what to do and my offer to help you put a plan together. The good news – EOS provides many of the foundational elements that help new leaders succeed.

**I am also available to do an LMA workshop as a stand alone management training or one that could serve as a kick-off to a series of management training events. If that is of interest, just email me directly and we can talk about it.