Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

by Gino Wickman

You cannot move on and finalize your three-year picture until everyone on the leadership team sees it clearly.

When everything is important, nothing is important.

decide on the three to seven most important priorities that must be completed this year in order for you to be on track for your three-year picture. These become your goals. They need to be specific, measurable, and attainable.

the goal must be specific, leaving no wiggle room.

“Attainable” means that it’s doable.

Once your one-year plan is clear, you need to narrow your vision all the way down to what really matters: the next 90 days.

Those priorities are called Rocks.

Quarterly Rocks create a 90-Day World for your organization, a powerful concept that enables you ...

You discuss and ultimately conclude what has to be executed in the next quarter to put you on track for the one-year plan, which in turn puts you on track for the three-year picture, and so on.

you should all be united on what objectives take precedence in the coming quarter.

you have to identify all of the obstacles that could prevent you from reaching your targets.

The sooner you accept that you have issues, the better off you’re going to be.

Your leadership team should state them openly and honestly so that you can get them out of your heads and into writing. In doing so, you’re...

The number one reason employees don’t share a company vision is that they don’t know what it is.

When everyone’s energy is going in the same direction, their accumulated drive will kick in and create an exponential force.

Don’t be afraid to let your people challenge the vision and ask questions. These inquisitions, along with the preceding dialogue, will help you both become more invested in the vision.

Be willing to be vulnerable.

But as a good manager, you’ll be doing them and others in the company a disservice by keeping them around. You may have to help free up the futures of the ones that don’t willingly leave.

Every 90 days, have a short (no more than 45-minute) state-of-the-company meeting with all employees. The objective of this event is to share successes and progress, review the V/TO, and communicate newly set company Rocks for the quarter.

In its purest form, the meeting has a three-part agenda. 1. Where you’ve been

Where you are 3. Where you are going Each quarter, you and your leadership team fill each of those agenda items with three of the most relevant data points, and you’ll deliver a clear, concise, and powerful message that keeps your people in the know. Its effectiveness stems from delivering it every quarter and being consistent.

You’ll need to give people the opportunity to ask questions and understand the vision. As a result, they’ll be able to decide if this is the company they want to be a part of. Through that process, they’ll be able to direct themselves.

People need to hear the vision seven times before they really hear it for the first time.

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.

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 of each employee fit with his or her Unique Ability

that everyone has a Unique Ability®. The trick is to discover yours.

You experience never-ending

improvement, feel energized rather than drained, and, most of all, you have a passion for what you’re doing that presses you to go further than others would in this area.

This person has been promoted to a seat that is too big, has outgrown a seat that is too small, or has been put in a position that does not utilize his or her Unique Ability

You have to make decisions for the greater good of the business, and you don’t have the luxury of keeping people around simply because you like them. If this is the case, you must let them go. This will be one of the toughest issues you will have to face.

What makes this person the wrong person is that he or she doesn’t share your core values. While this obstacle may seem like something you can live with in the short term, that person is killing your organization in the long run. He or she is chipping away at what you’re trying to build, in little ways that, most of the time, you don’t

even see. It’s that wry comment in the hallway, the dirty look behind your back, and the dissension that this person spreads.

Your job is to hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize all of your people around core values and Unique Abilities®. That’s the way to build an organization with all of the right people in the right seats.

The People Analyzer template can be downloaded from www.eosworldwide.com/people. First, put the names of the people you’re going to analyze in the left column. Then list your core values across the top. Then rate each person according to his or her adherence to the core values. Give one of three ratings:

However, this is only an ideal, so don’t get caught up in perfection. What your leadership team has to do is determine what the bar is. The “bar” is the minimum standard you will accept from the People Analyzer results.

The recommended bar for a company with five core values is three pluses, two plus/minuses, and never a minus.

What do you do if someone is below the bar? Before you make any drastic decisions, I highly recommend that you first communicate the People Analyzer results to the person and give that person the chance to better his or her performance. He or she will improve almost all of the time. The question is, will he or she improve enough to move above the bar? Most people will, some won’t, but you should give them a chance to perform according to the new structure.

This is a perfect example of how someone can muddle through in an organization that lacks clarity over roles, values, and expectations. When these tools are in place, with increased focus and accountability, there is simply no place for them to hide.

you’ll need to instill a few ground rules: 1. You must look forward. You cannot look back or get caught up in the present. It will distort your judgment.

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.

In order to maintain accountability, only one person can ultimately be in charge of any major function within an organization. Only one person oversees sales and marketing, only one person runs operations, and only one person manages finance and administration. When more than one person is accountable, nobody is.

The all-for-one and one-for-all approach won’t build a solid company.

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.

wonderful titles for this role, such as CEO, president, general manager, king, or queen. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but the bottom line is that the integrator is the person who has the Unique Ability® to run the organization, manage day-to-day issues that arise, and integrate the three major functions. The integrator is the glue that holds the company together.

the three major functions might split into more functions. For example, sales and marketing sometimes splits into a distinct sales function and a distinct marketing function. Operations sometimes splits into two or three distinct functions such as delivery, project management, or customer service. Finance and administration can split into as many as four: finance, administration, information technology (IT), and human resources (HR).

The visionary and the integrator couldn’t be more different.

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. They’re great solvers of big ugly problems (not the little practical ones), and fantastic with important clients, vendors, suppliers, and banking relationships. The culture of the organization is very important to them,

know thyself and be free. By contrast, integrators are typically very good at leading, managing, and holding people accountable. They love running the day-to-day aspects of the business. They are accountable for profit and loss, plus the overall business plan for the organization. They remove obstacles so that people running the major functions can execute. They’re great at special projects. In sum, they operate more on logic. If you are one, know thyself and be stressed

Clear accountability will take you to the next level. It’s common for a company to have a visionary but no integrator. This causes a real struggle, because the visionary is constantly frustrated with his or her lack of traction. In addition, he or she has to keep acting as the integrator and get pulled into the day-to-day management of the business.

The discovery came after observing many who’d been given seats but did not step up and fully assume their roles. These people were not fully performing because one of the three factors was absent. They didn’t get it, didn’t want it, or didn’t have the capacity to do the job.