Traction Before Vision

EOS’ Proven Process begins with three full-day sessions with the Leadership Team. In the first, Focus Day, I teach the Leadership Team the EOS tools that lay the foundation for execution – what we call Traction®. In the ensuing two sessions – which occur 30 and 60 days after Focus Day – we review and refine the team’s use of the Focus Day tools and also work on building out the company vision. Herein lies part of EOS’ secret sauce. We call it “Traction before Vision”. Truth be told, some Leadership Teams find it a little counterintuitive. In the interests of “open and honest”, I will confess I was among those skeptics back when I started implementing EOS in my own company.

“Why would we start executing before we fully define exactly where we are going?” I asked my EOS Implementer, Ed Callahan. Ed just smiled and said “Trust me….you’ll understand in 60 days”. I trusted him and, boy, was he right!

It could be argued that Vision Building can be done pretty quickly. However, once we have a vision, then what? The reality is that most teams don’t have the tools, the discipline, the sense of accountability and the rhythm of working together as a Leadership Team to execute on their vision.

Without a solid foundation of execution (Traction), the team would leap out of the starting gate and go nowhere fast. They’d quickly lose momentum and their vision exercise would become just another thing they tried that didn’t work.

That’s why we start with Traction first. In Focus Day, the team learns the basic tools of Traction. They learn to execute with discipline. They learn to hold each other (and themselves) accountable. They establish a steady rhythm of working together as a healthy, functional, cohesive Leadership TEAM. It takes about 60 days to get there – just the amount of time that elapses while we build out the vision.

So when Vision Building completes, two critical things come together at exactly the same time: the team is tightly aligned around their vision AND they have the muscles they need to execute on the work needed to make their vision real.

There is an old Chinese proverb that says “if you want to go fast, go slow”. By taking those 60 days to develop the ability to gain Traction – concurrently with Vision Building – we lay the foundation for the Leadership Team to come out of the starting gate fully aligned around their vision AND ready to run Full Speed Ahead on the journey of turning their vision into reality.