Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

by Gino Wickman

The quarterly state-of-the-company has proven to be the most effective discipline for helping people share, understand, and buy into the company vision. In its purest form, the meeting has a three-part agenda. 1. Where you’ve been 2. Where you are 3. Where you are going

People need to hear the vision seven times before they really hear it for the first time. Human beings have short attention spans and are a little jaded when it comes to new messages. As a good leader, you must remain consistent in your message. The first time they hear it, they’ll roll their eyes and say, “Here we go again.” (Remember, you created this culture through past inconsistencies.) The second time, they’ll still roll their eyes a little. But by the fourth and fifth time of hearing it, they’ll realize this is for real. By the seventh time, they’ll be on board. You’ll have to adjust your outlook from “I’ve told them three times—this is so frustrating!” to “I’ve told them three times—only four more to go!” Be patient, and remember that this is a journey.

The right people are the ones who share your company’s core values. They fit and thrive in your culture. They are people you enjoy being around and who make your organization a better place to be. A perfect example is the receptionist for Autumn Associates. As she returned home from vacation, her flight was delayed for so long that her plane landed only an hour before she was due back to work for an 8:00 a.m. meeting. The employees had created a custom of wearing logo apparel to all company meetings, so she had her mother pick her up from the airport with her company shirt. She changed in the car and was at work on time, apparel and all. This exemplified two of the company’s core values—commitment and caring. In this chapter you will be introduced to your second EOS tool, the People Analyzer, which will cut through the murkiness of personnel choices to show you who’s right for your company.

Core Values + People Analyzer = Right People

The right seat means that each of your employees is operating within his or her area of greatest skill and passion inside your organization and that the roles and responsibilities expected o...

there are only three major functions in any business and those three functions make every organization run, regardless of whether it’s a start-up business or the largest company in the world. To illustrate the three major functions, picture three boxes side by side by side. In the box to the left, you have the first major function: sales and marketing. In the middle box is the second: operations. In the box to the right, you have the third: finance and administration. You may call them by different names, but those are the three major functions. Sales and marketing generate business. Operations provides the service or manufactures the product, and takes care of the customer. Finance and administration manage the monies flowing in and out as well as the infrastructure.

The integrator is the person who harmoniously integrates the major functions of the business. When those major functions are strong and you have strong people accountable for each, great healthy friction and tension will occur between them. The integrator blends that friction into greater energy for the company as a whole.

The integrator is the glue that holds the company together.

The visionary and the integrator couldn’t be more different. In a small to mid-size company, the visionary is typically the owner, co-owner, or founder. In a partnership, most of the time, one partner is the visionary and the other is the integrator. It’s a dynamic that has elevated them to where they are. The visionary typically has 10 new ideas a week. Nine of them might not be so great, but one usually is, and it’s that one idea each week that keeps the organization growing. For this reason, visionaries are invaluable. They’re typically very creative.

An entrepreneur’s lust needs to be counterbalanced with a manager’s prudence and discipline.

the visionary function’s five roles might be as follows: • R&D/ideas • Creative problem-solving • Major relationships • Culture • Selling

LMA stands for leading, managing, and holding people accountable. Anyone in the Accountability Chart who has people reporting to him or her has a vital responsibility of LMA.

it’s time to put all the right people into the right seats. To do that you need only one filter: GWC. GWC stands for get it, want it, and capacity to do it.

He experienced all that pain for a year, when in hindsight he could have experienced only 36 hours of pain, probably for both parties. Incidentally, the terminated gentleman is now doing well and pursuing his passion. The decision was best for all.

Be careful what you wish for because you’ll get it. If you want to grow, you have to understand that not everyone is going to be able to keep up and remain in the same seat forever. 2. Keeping people around just because you like them is destructive. You’re doing a disservice to the company, to everyone in it, and to the person. People must add value. I realize this may sound cold, but to the degree people are in the right seats, everyone is happier, especially them.

When a client completes its Accountability Chart, we ask three questions to confirm that it is at 100 percent. Please ask these three questions with your leadership team: 1. Is this the right structure to get us to the next level? 2. Are all of the right people in the right seats? 3. Does everyone have enough time to do the job well?

With your vision clear and shared by all, and with the right people in the right seats, the next step is measuring your progress and having an absolute pulse on your business. That requires the use of data.

anything that is measured and watched is improved. The concept of managing through a Scorecard has been around for a long time. The idea has been expressed through many different terms. It’s been called a dashboard, flash report, scoreboard metrics, measurables, key performance indicators, smart numbers, and so on. Whatever you call it, it’s a handful of numbers that can tell you at a glance how your business is doing.

What are all of the numbers that must be on that piece of paper? Decide and list all of the categories that you’d need to track on a weekly basis to have that pulse. These categories should include items such as weekly revenue, cash balances, weekly sales activity, customer satisfaction/problems, accounts receivable and payable, and client project or production status, to name a few.

In the left-hand column, list who is accountable for each of the numbers. Only one person is ultimately accountable for each, and it’s usually the person heading up that major function.

The numbers in the Scorecard should be weekly activity-based numbers, not the type of high-level numbers you see in a profit and loss statement (P&L).

Complete mastery of your Data Component is achieved when you boil the organization’s numbers down to the point where everyone has a single meaningful, manageable number to guide them in their work.

Most leadership teams spend their time discussing the heck out of everything but rarely solving anything. What is draining your energy is not having a lot of work to do; rather, it’s having unresolved issues.

“It is less important what you decide than it is that you decide.” More is lost by indecision than by wrong decisions.

The first is a discipline of creating an Issues List. The second is the Issues Solving Track.

No one has ever died from being open about issues.

You cannot achieve this openness if people in the organization fear losing their jobs or some other terrible ramification. Therefore, trust starts with you. You set the tone by openly admitting mistakes and issues and then working together to solve them. Everyone must know that it’s okay to raise issues as long as they are corrected.

There should be three types of Issues Lists in your organization:

V/TO issues, weekly leadership issues, departmental issues

The Issues Solving Track consists of three steps: 1. Identify 2. Discuss 3. Solve

Plan on getting a little bit uncomfortable. Most causes of real issues are people.

It’s important to note that you cannot jump right to solving issues without implementing the Vision Component first. If your Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) is not complete and your leadership isn’t on the same page, you’ll never solve issues well. It’s like driving a car, not having a destination, and making turns randomly. If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t make decisions on which way to turn. Where decisions may have been difficult in the past, this step becomes much easier when your vision is clear.

2. Thou Shalt Not Be a Weenie The solution will always be simple; it’s just not always easy to implement. You must have strong will, have firm resolve, and be willing to make the tough decision.

In solving an issue, you have three options: You can either live with it, end it, or change it. There are no others.

To the degree you can clarify your systems and hone them, you will run your business as opposed to having your business run you. The culmination of identifying, documenting, and having everyone follow the core processes of your business is your Way.

To systemize your organization through your core processes, you must take two major steps. First, you have to document the core processes. Second, you have to ensure that they are followed by all.

Your core processes typically include the following: The HR process is the way you search, find, hire, orient, manage, review, promote, retain, and fire people. The marketing process is the way you get your message to your target audience and generate interest in what you do and prospects for your salespeople. The sales process is the way you convert a prospect into a customer. The operations processes are the way you make your product or provide your service to your customer. There are typically one to three core processes within operations (e.g., project management, logistics, warehouse, distribution, service technicians, account management, service delivery, production, quality control, customer service). The accounting process is the flow and management of all monies coming in and going out. The customer-retention process is the proactive way that you take care of your customers after your product or service has been delivered and the way you retain customers so that they continue to come back and send you referrals.

Key point in EOS Process

document the 20 percent that produces 80 percent of the results. In other words, document at a very high level.

As you simplify, most of the time you will find that your core processes are too complex. By documenting the process, you will find many opportunities to dumb them down by eliminating redundant steps, taking out any confusion and any complexity. The goal is to streamline.

Checklists have been an extremely effective tool for my clients to create consistency, quality control, and repeatable results. Please consider this heavily when documenting your core processes. There’s a reason pilots and health care professionals use them.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Four Thousand Weeks, the author pounts out that sometimes, there are too many rocks