Traction Page 16
Company Rocks due by March 31
1. Close $1 million in new business
2. Document delivery process and train all
3. Narrow CFO candidates to two
4. Implement new information systems software
STEP 4
Assign who owns each Rock. This is vital for clear accountability. Each of the three to seven company Rocks must be owned by one and only one person on the leadership team. When more than one person is accountable for a Rock, no one is accountable. The owner is the person who drives the Rock to completion during the quarter by putting together a timeline, calling meetings, and pushing people. At the end of the quarter, the owner is the one that everyone looks at to assure the Rock was completed.
STEP 5
Once the company Rocks are set, the members of the leadership team each set their own Rocks. They first carry forward any company Rocks that they own to their individual list of Rocks and then come up with their most important three to seven. Some of the Rocks that were discarded in Step 2 for the company can end up becoming individual Rocks for leadership team members. Please remember—no more than three to seven. Any Rock candidates left over on the original list that did not get picked up can be carried forward to the next quarter by putting them on the V/TO Issues List.
STEP 6
When all that great work is done, you then create what is called the Rock Sheet, which is just a landscaped piece of paper. At the top are the organization’s Rocks, and below that are each of the leadership team’s individuals Rocks. This Rock Sheet is brought into your weekly meetings to review your Rocks. It will help create clear accountability and focus on what is the highest priority in the organization. With that, a wall goes up, and no one is allowed to throw anything else over it, whether it’s a genius-level new idea or a hand grenade. Once the priorities are set for this quarter, no new priorities can be added! If someone does try to throw something else over, you get to throw it back because you all agreed on the current Rocks as being the most important priorities for this quarter. New ideas and thoughts that arise during the quarter should be put on the V/TO Issues List for next quarter. This approach will help you create laser focus for your organization. The following is an example of an effective Rock Sheet.
STEP 7
Share the company Rocks with the entire organization. As you learned in the Vision Component, the vision must be shared by all. Every quarter you should meet with the entire organization for your state-of-the-company meeting for no more than 45 minutes to share successes, progress, and the V/TO and to unveil the company Rocks for the quarter. Remember, people sometimes have to hear something seven times before they really hear it for the first time, and this is one of the ways they will ultimately share the vision.
STEP 8
Have each department set their Rocks as a team. Just as the leadership team sets their Rocks, each department team follows the exact same process to set theirs as well. In the end, each employee will have his or her own Rocks for the quarter. Please note that while the company and leadership team members should have three to seven Rocks, everyone else in the company should have one to three.
ROCK TRAPS AND PITFALLS
Your organization needs to avoid certain problems when establishing and carrying out its Rocks.
• Garbage in, garbage out. For every tool in the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), you will get out what you put in. If you set the wrong Rocks, you will spend an entire quarter pointed in the wrong direction. Make sure you spend the necessary time setting the right ones. Do not rush the process.
• It takes two quarters to master Rocks. You will not master the process the first time around. Be patient, because true mastery comes from experience. You need to learn from two quarters with only your leadership team setting Rocks before you roll out the Rocks process to everyone else. You will make some mistakes and it’s important you learn from those mistakes first so that you can be a better teacher for your people.
• Commitment fizzle. Make sure that when rolling out Rocks, you’re fully committed to them every quarter. Some clients start off with a bang and then don’t commit to their quarterly routine. As a result they stop sharing them with everyone, and your people will end up feeling like the Rocks process was just another flavor-of-the-month idea.
• Too many Rocks. Don’t give people outside of the leadership team more than three Rocks. The responsibility is too overwhelming for most employees to handle, and you would be violating the golden rule that less is more.
Image One’s Rob Dube explains the cumulative power of all those Rocks: “One year during our annual all-company meeting, I had an idea to go around the room and ask every team member to tell us a few of the Rocks they accomplished during the year. While each person was talking, I was writing the Rock on the whiteboard. By the end, I was off the whiteboard and onto many pieces of paper from the flip chart! When you have a team of 35 people like we do, take that number and multiply it by two Rocks per person for a quarter, you get 70. Then multiply that by the number of quarters in a year, and you get 280! That is the magic number—we took 280 steps in the right direction over the past 12 months. Amazing!”
MEETING PULSE
For now and forever, let’s dispel the myth that all meetings are bad, that meetings are a waste of time, and that there are already too many of them. The fact is that well-run meetings are the moment of truth for accountability. To gain traction, you’ll probably need to meet even more than you presently do.
* * *
In Patrick Lencioni’s book Death by Meeting, he opens the book by making a humorous observation. After hearing many leaders complain about meetings and saying things like, “If I didn’t have to go to meetings, I’d like my job a lot more,” Lencioni asks us to imagine hearing a surgeon saying to a nurse before surgery, “If I didn’t have to operate on people, I might actually like this job.” He then asks us to consider the fact that, for those of us who lead and manage organizations, meetings are pretty much what we do.
* * *
It’s possible to hold extremely productive meetings that actually save time. In this chapter, you will combine the 90-Day World with a powerful tool, the Level 10 Meeting. Together, these will enable you to have great meetings that increase communication, accountability, team health, and results. As a result of meeting more and following the Meeting Pulse, everyone will get more done. The time you spend meeting will actually free up time for moving forward.
The Meeting Pulse is your organization’s heartbeat. Rather than long, meandering meetings, a Meeting Pulse with a specific agenda throughout your departments will keep your organization healthy. A Meeting Pulse operates just like an EKG illustrating a spike. When people have to get something done for a meeting, they wait until the last minute and usually finish it—that’s the spike. The more you can increase the meeting interval, the more spikes you get, and then the more business you’ll finish. At first you’ll resist these regular meetings, but as soon as they become a habit, you’ll embrace them. You won’t know how you could have lived without them in the past. I have seen this happen with every client. It’s where the real magic happens.
The Meeting Pulse consists of two types of meetings. The first is quarterly and the second is weekly. Let’s take them one at a time, starting with the quarterly.
THE 90-DAY WORLD
As a part of your vision, you created a three-year picture. After that came a one-year plan and now a 90-Day World, as illustrated by the model on the following page. The 90-day idea stems from a natural phenomenon—that human beings stumble, get off track, and lose focus roughly every 90 days. To address this aspect of human nature, you must implement a routine throughout the entire organization that creates a 90-Day World.
I first discovered its effectiveness in my own organization. After my first full-day meeting with my leadership team, we all came out laser-focused on where we were going as an organization and what we had to do. Roles and responsibilities we
re agreed upon. We were on the same page and fired up. But 90 days later, for some reason, we’d all started to wander off track. I couldn’t explain why, so we held another meeting for a full day, pulling us all back together. We had a passionate, intense, productive meeting and got back on track again. Yet after another 90 days, I had to hold another meeting because I did not even recognize my team. “What happened to the people who were participating in that intense meeting 90 days ago?” I wondered. We couldn’t be further off the same page. But just like clockwork, by the end of the meeting, we were fired up and on the same page yet again.
I soon realized it was a normal cycle. When I really thought about the problem, I noticed it affected my Entrepreneurs’ Organization forum group, my friends, and my family. It seems to be human nature. Of the 1300 full-day sessions I’ve conducted, at least 900 have been quarterly sessions. People whose focus was clear in the prior quarterly session became unfocused by the following one. I would see absolute agreement on core issues the previous quarter and then total disagreement in the current one. By the end of the session, though, everyone would be back on track. In some situations, people didn’t even remember agreeing. Fortunately, I kept very good notes and could prove that they did.
Realizing this cycle was normal, I changed my attitude. First, I stopped getting frustrated and accepted it. Second, I decided to put together a great agenda for a powerful quarterly meeting every time. Now all EOS clients follow this exact same agenda in their quarterlies.
One last point: If you don’t continue to align quarterly, your organization will fragment to the point that you will get far off track, you will start to lose great people, you will lose sight of your vision, and you will end up right back where you started—in chaos.
To repeat, 90 days is about as long as a human being can stay focused. It’s human nature, so stop fighting it and solve the problem by following the Quarterly Meeting Pulse, thereby creating a 90-Day World for your company.
In addition, I strongly recommend that you hold your quarterly meetings off-site. When you’re at the office, there will be too many distractions to pull you back into the business. Being away provides a great opportunity for the team to truly work on the business.
THE EOS QUARTERLY MEETING PULSE
* * *
Who: The leadership team
Where: Off-site
Duration: Eight hours
Frequency: Every 90 days
Prework: Vision/Traction Organizer complete
(Everyone brings his or her issues and proposed priorities for the coming quarter)
* * *
THE QUARTERLY MEETING AGENDA
• Segue
• Review previous quarter
• Review the V/TO
• Establish next quarter’s Rocks
• Tackle key issues
• Next steps
• Conclude
Segue
This is the transition from a full 90 days of working hard in the business to starting to work on the business. Each person should share three things: (1) best business and personal news in the last 90 days, (2) what is working and not working in the organization, and (3) expectations for the day. Not only will this elevate everyone to working on the business, but it will also help set the stage for the quarterly meeting.
One person might say during his or her segue, “The best business news is that we landed the ABC account. What I feel is working is the new customer relationship management software. What I feel is not working are our delivery times, the customer service department, and our inventory system. My expectation is to solve these three things once and for all. Plus, I’d like us to be a healthier leadership team.” This, along with everyone’s segue, sets the tone for the meeting.
Review Previous Quarter
Review all of your numbers (quarterly revenue, profit, gross margin, and any other relevant key numbers) and your Rocks (company and leadership teams on the Rock Sheet) from the previous quarter to confirm which ones were achieved and which were not. I highly recommend simply stating “done” or “not done” for each. This will give you a clear, black-and-white picture of how you performed. Don’t get caught up in believing you can complete 100 percent of your Rocks every quarter. It’s perfectionist thinking and not realistic. You always want to strive for 80 percent completion or better—that’s enough to be truly great.
If you didn’t complete 80% you need to understand why and learn from it. Look at the Rocks you didn’t accomplish. Discuss why they weren’t completed. The two most common reasons for not achieving a Rock are:
• You took too much on and overshot, which was poor prediction on your part. In this case, your team will need to become better at setting more realistic Rocks. The first time most clients set their Rocks, they almost always set them too high.
• Someone dropped the ball. In other words, the Rock was attainable, but the person in charge did not give it his or her all. In this case, you have an accountability issue, and you need to put it on the Issues List and solve it. In the long run, you will reach a point where every member of the leadership team always gives his or her maximum effort when owning a Rock.
You have one of three options with incomplete Rocks:
1. Carry the Rock forward to the next quarter.
2. If the Rock is 95 percent complete, completing the last 5 percent simply becomes an action item for the To-Do List.
3. Reassign the Rock to someone else.
Review the V/TO
The sole intent of reviewing the V/TO every quarter is to refresh your memory on the vision and to make sure that everyone is still on the same page. Within that framework, you will set much better Rocks for the next quarter. When people are not on the same page, discuss and debate until they are.
* * *
Taking the necessary time to review the V/TO and get back on the same page in the quarterly meeting also leads to much better issue solving later in the session due to everyone having absolute clarity on the company’s greater good.
* * *
In an open and honest environment, everyone must voice their opinions if they don’t understand, don’t agree, or have a concern with any item in the V/TO. If there is any confusion, you must solve the issue at that moment until everyone is in concert. A good V/TO review takes between 30 minutes and two hours, depending how much discussion is needed. Make certain you conclude the V/TO review by updating the eighth section, the Issues List. Remove any issues that have been solved and add any new ones. This will build your Issues List for the day.
Establish Next Quarter’s Rocks
With the stage set from your segue, clarity on your results from the review of last quarter’s Rocks, your vision clearly in mind after your review of the V/TO, and your Issues List in front of you, you now follow the Rock-setting process covered earlier in this chapter.
List everything that must get done this quarter. Decide to keep, kill, or combine everything on the list, boiling them down to the right three to seven Rocks for the company and assign ownership. From there, establish each leadership team member’s Rocks and give them to one member to create the Rock Sheet.
Tackle Key Issues
With your Rocks set, you will have anywhere from one to four hours left in your meeting, depending on how long your V/TO review and Rock-setting took. It’s now time to tackle all of your relevant issues for the quarter. What makes for great meetings is solving issues. Start by making sure that all of the issues are on the list. Ask the team for any issues they have on their minds if they haven’t shared them already during the first half of the meeting.
You now go to the Issues List you have compiled, which includes issues from the first half of the meeting and all carryover issues from previous meetings that were listed on the V/TO Issues List. Remove all issues that were resolved by the creation of new Rocks.
Tackle the remaining issues following the Issues Solving Track—Identify, Discuss, and Solve (IDS). Establish the top three issue
s, then start with number one and work through the list in order of priority. For each issue, identify the real problem, then openly discuss all aspects of it, getting all opinions out on the table with no tangents. From there, move to solve the issue and make it go away forever. You will get through anywhere from one to 15 issues depending on the time you have and the magnitude of the issues.
Any issues you do not solve can simply be carried forward to your weekly Issues List or the V/TO Issues List, depending on their priority level. You will rarely solve them all. The important thing is to make sure you’re solving them in order of priority.
Next Steps
This part of the quarterly meeting is typically short. Everyone discusses any next steps—who is doing what, and whether there are any messages to communicate to the organization based on the decisions made in the meeting.
For instance, if you solved the issue mentioned in the segue regarding the customer service department, in Next Steps you might confirm that the director of operations is going to meet with everyone in customer service and together strategize and implement a plan this quarter to create a world-class customer service department.
Conclude
In concluding the meeting, everyone shares three things: (1) feedback on the meeting, (2) whether their expectations were met or not, and (3) their rating on the meeting from 1 to 10. You want the standard to average above 8.
It’s powerful how much the Quarterly Meeting Pulse can do for you. It focuses everyone on which direction you should row. You come out fired up and ready to take on the next quarter.
However, like clockwork, you’re going to start getting off track again 90 days later. Some quarters, you may think that you don’t need to meet. I can remember several times needing to convince my partners after they asked, “Why are we meeting again? Aren’t things going pretty well?” Don’t fall into this trap. You have to combat the human tendency to want to coast for a while and take a little pressure off. I have clients that call once in a while prior to a quarterly, saying they don’t think they need to meet. After I convince them they do, in every case they have reported they were glad they did. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the words “Wow, and I didn’t think we’d have anything to talk about this quarter!” at the end of a client quarterly session.