Episode #117 - Putting People in the Right Positions

Transcription: 

Sean Riley:

So with all the fancy introductions out of the way, welcome to the podcast, Rich Bahr.

Richard Bahr:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Sean Riley:

Oh, the pleasure is all ours. So you just came off-stage at the Executive Leadership Conference for PMMI. I saw your session. It was wonderful. And I'm going to be honest, I'm not as well-read on this as I guess I should be, and I'm not as familiar with EOS and Traction. So I guess for our listeners out there who also may not be up to speed on this, could you give us a little overview on exactly what EOS Traction is?

Richard Bahr:

EOS is an acronym, it stands for Entrepreneurial Operating Systems. So the term EOS or Traction are used often interchangeably, and it's simply an operating system for your business. If you think about, we use that term operating system for your computer, your PC or your phone, your mobile phone, so the operating system is, it's the way that things work. It's what makes things work, it's how it runs, it's how it responds to data, it's how it responds to inputs, it's what it provides. And every organization, whether they have identified it or not, has an operating system. They just may not have a label for it or have identified that. But EOS or Traction is a very specific operating system that, I'm sure we'll talk about in a moment, but it's very high on... It's very people-centric, it's very people-oriented. It's high on accountability and it's very high on creating rhythm.

Sean Riley:

Okay. So I get that, again, from a high level perspective, but I guess with the word entrepreneurial in there it leads me to my next question of who then should be using this? Who is best that this should apply to from a company standpoint, whether it's size, money-wise, or number of employees? Who do you think this is best directed towards?

Richard Bahr:

So Gino Wickman is the founder of EOS Worldwide and the author of the first book in the EOS library called Traction, which kicked this whole thing off. And he was an entrepreneur and found that this was the way that he, I guess, developed or fell into how he operated his business and found this to be successful. And it was a smaller business at the time. So you're right, in one way, that it was originally designed for entrepreneurial owner-run organizations. Now that said, fast-forward 12 or 14 years or however long it's been since Traction was published, and it's been adopted by organizations that are significantly larger than that.

I know in my, I'm no longer an EOS implementer, which is somebody that's certified to help companies guide them through the process. But during my implementation days and even in my private coaching practice now, in my private coaching practice now I've got companies that are well over a hundred million dollars that have multiple operating groups underneath them that are operating in Traction. So there's probably a tap-out size, I suppose. I don't know what it would be, but I wouldn't be super afraid of being a hundred million dollar or more company and still using the operating system that is in the book.

Sean Riley:

It's interesting how it can be applied from a base level to such a larger company, as you mentioned. You had made a comment about right people, right seats, and I was hoping maybe you could expand on that for our listeners because it was an interesting way of saying something that I am sort of a firm believer in.

Richard Bahr:

That language was borrowed from Jim Collins who wrote Good To Great, Built To Last, I think previous to that, and several other great books, I mean well-known of course. And I believe that Gino Wickman borrowed that language from him. So Collins talked about having all the right people on the bus in the right seats. That was the visual that accompanies that language. And what Traction does is it takes that, I would say, maybe even a step further in terms of granularity of definition, and it breaks those two things apart where a right person is somebody who aligns with the organizational values. So if you have values of integrity, customer service, love, I don't know, whatever your values might be, that you've got firm alignment by each person in the organization with those values. A right seat gets more to the person's ability or desire to actually perform in the seat that they're in, meaning their role.

Do they have the intellect, the talent, the skills, the training, the desire to actually do the job that they're in? So if you take that the next step, you can think, "Well, so is it possible to have somebody that's really great in their job but maybe don't align with our values?" And the answer is yes. And most of us recognize those people because they terrorize us. They are people that we think, "I can't imagine how would we continue on if so-and-so's not in their role? Oh my gosh, they're irreplaceable, but yet..." So we feel a bit held hostage. I call them organizational terrorists, is my language. We can't imagine going on without them, but we all hate dealing with them and living with them. And so those are people that might actually do their job very, very well, but don't align with the values.

And then we can also have the other side of that too, where we've got somebody that everybody loves and she's a great team player and she totally, totally lines up with all of our values, but she's in accounting and she's not very good with numbers. And we're like, "Huh, okay, well." So that might be a person that you might say, "So let's assess her and let's find out maybe what she's really, really good at and let's reassign her to another role maybe that she can really get and want and has great capacity to do it because she's a keeper." The first person we should be eliminating. The second one we might possibly keep if we have room in our organization for her.

Sean Riley:

And that's what I was saying, it's not necessarily that the second person is bad or is a bad worker, it's just that they might not... Like you said, they're the right person, they're just in the wrong seat, for lack of a better, I guess, analogy.

Richard Bahr:

Correct. Yeah.

Sean Riley:

And you told a story that sort of ties into that to a way lesser degree. But you have a theory or a take on complex problems that I really thought would be great if you could share that with our listeners, because I really like the story that you used as a reference to that about the engineer and that situation and how that unfolded. Is that something you could share with us?

Richard Bahr:

Well, so that what you're referring to, Sean, is when... So Traction is a construct called IDS, identify, discuss, and solve, and it's the way that we process issues as teams. And my suggestion for everybody as a takeaway was that as a team, when we come across what is maybe a complex issue, it seems overwhelming to us, I would suggest considering the possibility that it might actually be more than one issue. That's what makes it complex. Not always, but just consider that that's a possibility. And so, the example that I gave was we had a key person in our organization that exited suddenly and he was only in that role for, I don't know, I want to say maybe six months. I'm trying to remember the time, but it wasn't terribly long. And we had just come off of a time before that where that seat was vacant and then we had temporarily filled it in a way that it didn't work very well.

So when this person suddenly exited, our leadership team had gotten together. And this is seven or eight months into operating in Traction in my business. We got together as a team and we talked about the issue and we knew that we didn't want to go back and implement the temporary solution we did before because it didn't work very well. So we really were at a loss of what to do. And it felt like a very complex issue to us, which indeed what it was was it was actually more than one issue. It maybe sounds elementary, but it was overwhelming at the time. And the two issues were what do we do now and what do we do long-term? So you can imagine that those are two very different conversations, probably held at different times. So what are we going to do in the interim right now? And then what should we be doing long-term? Should we restructure this? What kind of a person are we looking for?

Where should we be looking for them? What differences to the role or the job description or the criteria should we be looking for? So those are all the long-term conversations. The short-term conversations are who's going to run this department, how are we going to do that? And that was the meeting where we came up with a bunch of names. We worked on that issue first and identified that there was two people in the room actually that were capable of doing the job and were willing to do the job on the interim basis. And that was the epiphany moment that I'd shared from stage that the one individual raised his hand and said, "I would like to do this job on an interim basis. I believe I'm capable of doing the job, but I feel like for the greater good of the organization with what I have on my plate right now to serve our customers and the company the best, I think I should stay where I'm at. And I think the other person ought to fill that seat temporarily."

And so that was a big moment for me that I thought, "Wow, we really are beginning to create a culture where people are setting aside their personal ambitions and really thinking about the greater good of the organization." That was a big moment for me.

Sean Riley:

Yeah. And that's why I appreciated the story and hoped you would be able to share it again because it does speak to that, I don't know. It's kind of that knowing what you don't know and knowing what you're good at and knowing where you're best used versus always trying to climb over everyone else to get to the top. Sometimes those two things don't necessarily mesh, even though that might be the, I don't know, "American way" or capitalist way to do things. And I thought that was a great way of portraying that and in line with Traction as well.

Again, because we're in a different sort of format, I kind of referenced in our intro where they can see the majority of the things that you referenced during your talk. So I guess if we could just get from you, after people who want to go look at that stuff, get a larger picture of how Traction works, what would you give as some tips on utilizing it or sort of implementing it into your company? I think you had a couple, maybe three, that you put out there for everyone to take advantage of.

Richard Bahr:

So let me first mention, and I maybe should have mentioned this at the top, but I think to me what I learned about Traction is that it closes the gap between what I know and what I do. And anybody that's been operating a company for a while, they're actually probably a slightly better than average intelligence person and a slightly more than average ambition person, I would say probably. Maybe that's and understatement. So they're no dummy and they're no slouch. And so people like that, they've got lots of ideas and there's not generally a shortage of them, and they have lots of ambition and want to do things.

I would say that was me as well. The challenge was that we weren't great as a team. And I would say as an individual, I wasn't world-class at executing on those things. I had more ideas than I actually had resources, had a hard time sorting those things out, getting everybody on the same page so that we were all kind of rowing in the same direction and working on the same thing. So that to me was the big takeaway with Traction, is that it really solves those things. The implementation suggestions that I had, and again, this isn't anywhere in the literature, the books or online. This is just-

Sean Riley:

Rich Bahr.

Richard Bahr:

... just one guy, yeah, one guy that ran a business in Traction and was a successful implementer for a period of time and coached lots of people that implemented EOS. I think the first thing was was that we decided to do it pure for the first two years. Pure meaning do it by the book. I think for all the smart people, and I don't mean that, I'm not saying that tongue in cheek, but for all the really intelligent, well-meaning people that are listening to this podcast, there's probably not a process that you haven't seen that couldn't be fixed or a gadget or a gear or something that couldn't be designed to be more efficient. So we've got lots and lots of smart people in this industry.

Resist your own urge to make this better or to fix it or to change it or make it yours. Just resist that urge. There are literally tens of thousands of companies that have operated in this system, done it successfully. And if you're listening to this podcast, it's probably because you want your business to run better. So what makes you think you're so smart that you should be changing it right from the get-go? We decided to run it pure for the first couple years, not tweak and change it. The second thing we did was we kind of did it in secret, meaning that as a leadership team and me specifically as an owner and a CEO, we got... I was guilty of the flavor of the month. I would come to a great conference like the PMMI ELC and I would get my head full of all sorts of ideas, and I would come back and rush into the conference room, to the morning staff meeting, and I would tell everybody about the great thing we're about to endeavor into.

And people got fatigued, people got tired, people didn't take things serious anymore, and we just didn't, it wasn't sticky. So what we decided as a leadership team was that for the first six months we were going to operate it, we were going to implement it, we were going to be sure that we had our rhythm and our cadence and our commitment to it before we started letting the rest of the organization in on it. And the third thing was really to get a great implementer. Now, you can do this yourself. You can buy the book, you can read it and you can implement it, and God bless you if you try to do that. And it is done. But when I had my implementation practice, it was really built around companies that had attempted to self-implement and weren't satisfied, or companies that had an implementer that maybe early on wasn't successful.

So there's an awful lot that EOS teaches in their academy, teaches implementers about how to do this and how to facilitate. And there's a lot of materials available to implementers that are not widely available. So I would say as an implementer, I was taught a lot of things that I would've no idea about from reading the books and the literature. And it really developed a set of skills in me that made me, I felt like a very good facilitator of this. So it's really worth the money and the time to get somebody as a guide to help you get this implemented.

Sean Riley:

Love it. That's fantastic. Well, I want to thank you again, Rich, for taking time. I know you just got done giving a whole presentation and then you had to come out and speak to us immediately after, so that was probably a full hour and a half to two hours of speaking about this. So we appreciate you taking some extra time to come on the podcast and speak with us today.

Richard Bahr:

Great. Thanks for having me and blessings to everybody in this industry and best of luck.