EOS and the New Year
The Simplest Job Descriptions
August 6, 2018
“Be and Do” – the Simplest Message for your Employees
April 17, 2019
I’ve been thinking about the psychology of the “New Year”. There is something so emotionally resonant about the possibility of turning over a new leaf. It’s a break: a time for endings and a time for beginnings. As the holidays inspire thoughts of peace and hope, there is an openness to new ideas and being ‘refreshed’. As a leader in your business, you should use this openness as another prime opportunity to communicate with your employees about the state of the company.
The EOS State of the Company speech – Shared By All
In ‘pure’ terms, the EOS State of the Company is the quarterly habit of reminding everyone about:
- Where we’ve been
- Where we are
- Where we’re going
Right from the Traction book: “It is the most effective discipline for helping people share, understand, and buy into the company vision.”
I love the Samuel Johnson quote about “people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed”. Ask my wife: I’m not dumb, I just need to be reminded… often… 😉
“Patrick Lencioni (5 Dysfunctions of a Team) cited the above quote from Johnson in a blog from April 2008. “I‘ve recently come to the conclusion that I should stop reading so many new books and magazine articles,” he wrote. “Instead, I should go retrieve the top ten books and articles that I‘ve already read, and start re-reading them again and again. After all, I‘ve forgotten most of what I‘ve learned in those books, and I‘m certainly not using or tapping into more than a fraction of what they have to offer. Instead, I‘m pursuing more and more new material, which only crowds out the space in my brain to recall and put to use the tried and true goodness of what I‘ve already learned.” Inc. Blog
Leaders need to repeat themselves – often. You should feel like a broken record. You should get right up to the point where your people are rolling their eyes and finishing your sentences when you start talking about things like your Core Values, Core Focus, 10-year Target, and Marketing Strategy. After all, if you and your leadership team don’t say it, who will?
In fact, you should be having specific communications every quarter. Of course, you should be living your vision end reinforcing it every day – but the EOS State of the Company Speech is the time to repeat yourself in the purest form. You are taking all the ideas in the Vision/Traction Organizer and communicating them in prose. In doing this, you are actually taking the laws laid down in all five of the “EOS Foundational Tools” and communicating them in a cohesive story.
The “EOS Foundational Tools”:
- V/TO
- Accountability Chart
- Rocks
- Scorecard
- Meeting Pulse
Our State of the Company speech outline for BlueHat Mechanical goes something like this:
- Where we’ve been (share success and progress):
- Big changes this year
- New people
- Notable projects completed. Key accomplishments and the people who made them possible. (Working in some cumulative Scorecard hits and misses and Accountability Chart clarifications)
- Where we are:
- Review the V/TO
- Core Values callouts (recognizing some way every employee exemplified our core values)
- A reminder of our Core Focus and our 10-year Target: What we do and why we do it.
- A Reminder of our Marketing Strategy: Who loves us and why they love us. (Why we win and why we will continue to win.)
- Where we are going:
- 3-year Picture
- 1-year Plan & Goals for the year
- Quarterly Rocks – our focus for the next 90 days
It’s a clear, concise, and powerful message that keeps your people in the know.
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As always, I’m here to help. If you need any help with your State of the Company or anything else, don’t hesitate to ask.
Happy New Year!
Next Steps:
- To learn more, you can download a free chapter of Traction here: EOS Traction Chapter 1
- For a free overview of EOS and the tools that can transform your business, schedule me here: 90 Minute Workshop
