Traction Read online

Your Way is now ready to use for reference and training. That’s when the real magic happens. Now, everyone in the company can be trained to follow the correct process. This happened at an upscale pub and billiards restaurant called Roosevelt’s. After co-owner Bill Gitre got his team in place, they went to work on documenting and simplifying their Way. The business model has become successful enough that they are now opening a second location.

  FOLLOWED BY ALL

  When everyone follows their process, it’s much easier for managers to manage, troubleshoot, identify and solve issues, and therefore grow the business. The clear lines of process enable you to let go and gain more control. Your business now becomes more scalable, which means that you can add more customers, transactions, revenue, and employees while reducing complexity.

  In order to implement this crucial step, your leadership team must be convinced that everyone should follow one system. To convince your people to follow the process, your leadership team needs to be committed to managing all of the people to make the adjustment. If you are all committed, it will work. If you’re not, it won’t. “Do as I say, not as I do” is not effective management. I say this because most of the time this step fails because the owner or owners are not willing to follow the process.

  Assuming you’re convinced, the following step requires you to convince your people. You have to consider their point of view. If you didn’t see the value in following a process before, how can you expect your people to see the value now? What you need to show is how the new system will create efficiencies to make their lives easier and the company more successful. They need to understand how the processes tie together into a complete system.

  You shouldn’t expect them to put you on their shoulders and carry you out of the room cheering, but do expect them to follow their assigned processes. While this isn’t quite like announcing a company-wide 25 percent raise, you should present it with the same enthusiasm. If you have the right people in the right seats, they will see the value, appreciate it, and benefit from it.

  One of the best ways to convince them is by creating a clear visual of what your Way looks like. Business processes are often intangible and therefore tough for people to understand. To the degree that you can illustrate what it looks like, you will accomplish this objective.

  Sachse Construction came up with a great illustration. Owner Todd Sachse created a model of how all of the processes worked together in his organization. When he did his presentation on the importance of everyone following a process, his visual showed how every time a person follows a step in the process, it affects others. He called it the Circle of Life. Just as in nature, everyone in the organization depends on each other to thrive. By everyone following their process, everyone’s life is ultimately going to be better. The opposite holds true as well. When someone doesn’t follow the process, it has a negative effect on others in the organization. This knowledge actually motivates his people to work together and help make each process better. As a result, all processes in his Way are understood, embraced, and followed by everyone in his organization.

  “FOLLOWED BY ALL” ACTION STEPS

  1. Create your Circle of Life visual.

  2. Schedule a company meeting to share your Way or share it at your next quarterly company meeting.

  3. Retrain everyone.

  4. Manage your people to follow the processes.

  With your business systemized, you can better troubleshoot when problems arise, since many of them result from process-related issues. For instance, maybe there’s an invoice that didn’t go out due to the customer service representative not forwarding a copy of the order form to accounting. Track the problem to the source and solve it. When a problem occurs, you can go right to the step that is not working and alter or eliminate it. In some cases, you may add a new step. But you’re simply performing maintenance at this point. You now have everything you need to get your Way followed by all.

  Strengthening the Process Component will give you more control. You will have options with your business: to grow it, step away from it, sell it, maintain it, franchise it, or duplicate it in another city. Whichever option you choose, your organization’s value has increased. Your organization will be worth more as a result. This is what people that purchase businesses are looking for: a turnkey system. For instance, the owners of Image One were approached by a billion-dollar publicly traded company in the same industry and eventually sold to them. The president of the division at the time, who previously worked for Jack Welch at GE, said that Image One was one of the best-run companies he’d ever seen.

  With the mastery of the Process Component, you’re closing in on achieving your destination.

  You’re now ready to bring it all down to the ground with the final piece of the puzzle—the Traction Component.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE

  TRACTION COMPONENT

  FROM LUFTMENSCH TO ACTION!

  Action is the process of doing. That’s what this chapter is all about. Gaining traction means making your vision a reality. At this moment, your vision is crystal clear, you have the right people in the right seats, you’re managing data, you’re solving your issues, and you’ve defined your Way of doing business and everyone is following it. Now you’re ready to master organizational traction, the final piece of the puzzle. Mastering the first five components was essential before tackling this component, because without them, you might gain traction, but in the wrong direction. When the first five components are strong, you will take off in the right direction—toward your vision.

  The ability to create accountability and discipline, and then execute, is the area of greatest weakness in most organizations. If I asked you to rate the level of accountability in your organization on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being your perfect level of accountability, how would you rate it? Successful leaders rate themselves high because they know how to gain traction. When meeting with the average new client for the first time, though, they typically rate their current accountability at 4.

  This is a real shame, because the world is filled with many great visions. Unfortunately, most will go unrealized due to an inability to gain traction. Visionaries like to stay on a high plane, not at ground level. After more than 20 years of observing failures, I realized how to bridge the gap between vision and execution.

  I recently learned a word that makes the point. Luftmensch is a Yiddish word made from two others; luft means “air” and mensch means “person.” A luftmensch is an “air-person,” someone who has his or her head in the clouds. I don’t mean this as an insult. Ideas come from having your head in the clouds. Most visionaries would agree with me. That is their gift, their strength, and their value. Nothing exists without visionaries. Yet once the vision is clear, you need to go from luftmensch to action.

  Most leaders know that bringing discipline and accountability to the organization will make people a little uncomfortable. That’s an inevitable part of creating traction. What usually holds an organization back is the fear of creating this discomfort. But you don’t have any other option if you want to build a great company. If you can accept the fact that you’re going to make people a little uncomfortable for a short time, the solution is actually straightforward. You need to implement two simple practices.

  As with all the steps along the way, this one requires a total commitment from the leadership team. There will be far too many opportunities to pull back and retreat. If your leadership can stay the course, however, within months your people will appreciate the increased accountability, improved communication, and solid results. The discomfort you were concerned about turns out to be not nearly as bad as you thought. And truth be told, the people who continue to resist are either the wrong people or in the wrong seat.

  This is one of the secrets to the EOS methodology: We don’t let leadership teams turn back. For that, they eventually thank us and say they don’t know how they could previously have lived without this high level of traction, accountabili
ty, and results.

  What are the two disciplines needed to gain traction? First, everyone must set specific, measurable priorities. Second, you must meet better as an organization. These two essentials are called: Rocks and a Meeting Pulse.

  Before we dig deeper into each of the disciplines, I offer some before-and-after statements from clients that have fully implemented these traction tools. You or your people may relate to them.

  BEFORE TRACTION

  No Accountability

  • “I really didn’t know who I was accountable to.”

  • “Although we agreed to meet on a regular basis, in actuality we didn’t. We lacked accountability and focus.”

  • “Before Rocks, there was no clarity.”

  Poor Communication

  • “I felt alone in my understanding of what was needed in the company. I also was misunderstood.”

  • “I’ve worked here for over 20 years, and before Rocks, I was never in the loop.”

  Stagnation

  • “We were fairly disciplined about creating one-year goals, but would frequently find ourselves at the end of the year having made no substantive progress toward those goals. It was tough to stay focused on them throughout the year.”

  • “We had no clear direction or priority. Everything was important, and as a result our efforts were not directed where they were most effective. ‘We suffered from the classic ‘show up and work for work’s sake.’”

  • “Everything was a priority.”

  Chaos

  • “It was tough to get out of the day-to-day emergencies and focus on the most important priorities.”

  • “We didn’t meet very often. Coming to a decision could take weeks, and we always had to re-present the information.”

  • “Things slipped through the cracks.”

  • “No structure, lack of communication around goals and issues. Problems were not resolved, and they just stacked up. We had no method to measure results.”

  • “We were very reactionary, dealing with the problem of the week or month.”

  • “It was not clear whose job was whose, so I always felt everything was on my shoulders and I had to do it all.”

  AFTER TRACTION

  Accountability

  • “After Rocks, everyone on the team has responsibility, clarity, and timing on what has to get done. Also, each team member is clear on his or her accountability. Everyone is on the same page.”

  • “I see us now working more as a cohesive unit with purpose and direction. We are working toward closure with issues, employee accountability, and job responsibilities. We now have some organization with a focus on what we do best.”

  • “With the Rocks and Meeting Pulse in place, I feel the ability for me and my team to focus better on the big-picture items. More is getting done in the same amount of time, and we have a heightened sense of urgency to get things done by certain due dates.”

  Communication

  • “The meetings are 90 minutes and no longer. It’s taking time, but I can now see the benefits of having weekly meetings as opposed to monthly.”

  • “Now at least with the Rocks and weekly meetings, I get a sense of priority, and I know what direction the company is going.”

  • “The Meeting Pulses have really served as an excellent communication vehicle to cascade messages within our rapidly changing environment.”

  Organization

  • “Rocks gave me a way to check in with my reports and drive better results in a highly consistent manner.”

  • “Life after Rocks is very rewarding! All players are on the same page. We are focused toward a common goal. There is clarity in both expectations and direction. We can clearly identify weak performers and those that do not fit within our organization. Truly, it is like night and day!”

  • “Rocks keep everyone focused, and allow us to work toward one-year goals in bite-sized chunks. Rocks have become the measurable and the lingo of our organization. We see employees seriously approaching their Rocks with a sense of pride and commitment.”

  Traction

  • “Now I feel that the forward momentum is turbocharging our organization by getting everyone to help row the boat.”

  • “With Rocks, we have found the way to achieve goals, hold people accountable, and move in a positive direction on a continuous basis.”

  • “Now we are getting ahead of the problems and pushing into prediction and working on our systems. We have more time to work forward, not deal with past problems.”

  ROCKS

  With a clear long-term vision in place, you’re ready to establish short-term priorities that contribute to achieving your vision. You will establish the three to seven most important priorities for the company, the ones that must be done in the next 90 days. Those priorities are called Rocks.

  One of our students at the sales training company illustrated the power of setting 90-day priorities. In the days when his family picked cotton by hand, the student said he would stand at the foot of the field, look out at the acres and acres of cotton, and feel overwhelmed by the work that needed to be done.

  To make the prospect of picking all those acres less overwhelming, someone would pick up a stick and throw it as far as he or she could. Then everybody would just put their heads down and “pick to the stick.” When they got there, they’d pick up that stick, throw it out again, and repeat the process.

  That’s why you create a 90-Day World. Rather than be overwhelmed by the monumental task of accomplishing your vision, this allows you to break it down into bite-size chunks called Rocks and focus on making it to the stick.

  Your company will have Rocks, each member of your leadership team will have Rocks, and your employees will also have Rocks. The reason to limit Rocks to three to seven (preferably closer to three) is that you’re going to break the organization of the habit of trying to focus on everything at once. It simply can’t be done. By limiting priorities, you can focus on what is most important. With the increased intensity of focusing on a limited number of Rocks, your people will accomplish more. Remember the old saying: When everything is important, nothing is important. The way you move the company forward is one 90-day period at a time.

  Rocks create a short-term focus similar to the point I raised earlier from Al Ries’s book Focus. To the degree that you focus everyone in one direction, you’ll gain the power of that laser beam, gaining traction toward your goals.

  Once your vision is clear, you will set better Rocks. Setting these priorities becomes simple. Once you set the company Rocks and then the leadership team’s Rocks, you then communicate these Rocks to the entire organization so they can set theirs. This process creates alignment. The exact process for establishing Rocks as a team and then rolling out this process organization-wide will be explained in this chapter.

  By the way, it doesn’t matter what you call these priorities; however, most companies really like calling them Rocks. I learned the term from Verne Harnish, the author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. Verne got it from an analogy in Stephen Covey’s book First Things First. Picture a glass cylinder set on a table. Next to the cylinder are rocks, gravel, sand, and a glass of water. Imagine the glass cylinder as all of the time you have in a day. The rocks are your main priorities, the gravel represents your day-to-day responsibilities, the sand represents interruptions, and the water is everything else that you get hit with during your workday. If you, as most people do, pour the water in first, the sand in second, the gravel in third, and the rocks last, what happens? Those big priorities won’t fit inside the glass cylinder. That’s your typical day.

  What happens if you do the reverse? Work on the big stuff first: Put the rocks in. Next come the day-to-day responsibilities: Add the gravel. Now dump in the sand, all those interruptions. Finally, pour the water in. Everything fits in the glass cylinder perfectly; everything fits in your day perfectly. The bottom line is that you need to work on the biggest priorities—your Rocks—f
irst. Everything else will fall into place.

  Less is always better, and a few priorities are better than many. Do less, accomplish more. Most organizations start out the year with a huge ball of priorities and get very little done by the end of the year. By coming up with Rocks every quarter, you create a 90-Day World.

  The process works like this: Your team meets for a full day every 90 days. You review your vision, and then determine what the Rocks are for the organization for the next 90-day period to keep you on track for your vision.

  ESTABLISHING YOUR ROCKS

  STEP 1

  After reviewing your V/TO and getting on the same page, your leadership team lists everything on the whiteboard that has to be accomplished in the next 90 days. On average, you’ll discover about 10 to 20 things that you’d like to close out, although one client came up with 75.

  STEP 2

  With that list of 10 to 20 items in front of you, discuss, debate, and determine the most important priorities for the company in the next 90 days. Make a decision on each one whether to keep it, kill it, or combine it as a company Rock for the quarter. You make as many passes at the list as necessary until you’re down to three to seven. As a result, the right ones will rise to the top.

  STEP 3

  Once you’ve narrowed your list, set the date that the Rocks are due. This is typically by the end of the quarter (i.e., March 31, June 30, September 30, and December 31). Now define each one by making sure the objectives are clear. This is vital.

  A Rock is specific, measurable, and attainable. For example: “Close three core accounts” or “Hire a new controller.” A Rock is not a to-do that is open-ended or vague. “Start working on the Customer Service Process” is not specific, measurable, and attainable, and is therefore not a good Rock.

  A Rock must be clear so that at the end of the quarter, there is no ambiguity whether it was done or not. Here is an example of four company Rocks that were set and defined: