How to Self-Implement EOS? (A 7-Step Tough Love Guide)
Self-implementing EOS® is one of the options available for making your business run on the Entrepreneurial Operating System®. It is an alternative to hiring a Professional EOS Implementer and paying him or her several thousand dollars for facilitating on average 5 days of leadership meetings a year, to implement and maintain Traction® in your business.
For self-implementers, all the information and tools are available on EOS Worldwide’s Base Camp subscription for a modest monthly fee. The implementer who volunteers, or is selected, for the job can go online, study the materials and if they make the effort, can deliver an acceptable experience to their team. This is not easy, but it can be done. Read on to find out how.
Having recently signed up another client who had previously implemented EOS in-house, I now have confirmation directly from 3 different horses’ mouths about what it takes to successfully self-implement.
Follow the below steps to do a great job:
- Read Traction® and Get a Grip, 5-times each. Learn the facilitation guides like an actor learns a play. Practice until you are comfortable.
- Find a couple of smaller companies and practice facilitating on them first, even pro bono. They will benefit tremendously from being taught the EOS tools, even if you are far from great yet. Ask them for feedback, so that you can fix your flaws and weaknesses.
- After starting to work with your own team, try to be and appear to be objective.
- Ask for complete openness from your leadership team and commit to and demonstrate that you will not punish them for any dissenting opinions.
- Facilitate EOS’s discovery processes and arbitrate them without being, or appearing to be, biased or seeking a specific outcome. Do that even if the result changes the mission that you had written for your company’s website. The Entrepreneurial Operating System is a set of leadership disciplines that have to be co-discovered and co-created by your leadership team, so that everyone contributes to and becomes part of the process. This will not be easy, but others have done it before you.
- Hold yourself and everyone else in the company accountable. Be ready to walk the talk and try to do each piece of the process to close to 100% while celebrate everyone else when they approach 80%.
- If anyone of your team is confused, or were to push back on any piece of the system, have an explanation, an analogy or a story at hand, to straighten them out. You can glean these from the books in the Traction library.
You can self-implement EOS, but be prepared to be like Rambo sawing up his own wound. It is doable, but don’t expect to be perfect from the get go, or to do it painlessly.
Your staff will often be skeptical that as the business owner or CEO you will stick with changing the status quo and, if you are an employee, it will take guts to shape the discussion and deliver sensitive feedback to powerful team members, including and especially, the top dog.
