Do you have a grip on your business?

My appetite for Gino Wickman's 'Traction' was unexpected. I had anticipated learning best practices for solving common business issues, but I did not expect to stumble into the gold mine of entrepreneurial advice that this book is.

I also did not expect to regularly experience the sensation of attaching my own experiences with work, teams, and colleagues to the learnings - I love when this happens. As I continued to read through there were countless practices identified that I had seen work in my own life. These moments served as a reminder and an affirmation of the importance of these lessons.

One thing is for sure, Wickman's Entrepreneurial Operating System is hard to ignore.

It’s entertaining, intelligent, and provides a realistic approach to overcoming the most typical obstacles entrepreneurs confront.?

Lesson 1: Get your team rowing in the same direction

"Most entrepreneurs can clearly see their vision. Their problem is that they make the mistake of thinking everyone else in the organisation sees it too."

Too often, the vision of an early-stage company is bottled up in the heads of the entrepreneurial founder or founders. The first lesson Wickman teaches is the importance of having your team rowing in the same direction.

This means crystallising where the company is heading, how you're getting there, and why you've chosen it as a destination. This is your vision. It must be understood and believed in by everyone in the organisation - if not, they've boarded the wrong ship and will do more harm than good over the long term.

Wickman delivers a system to achieve this first step to building your effective business solution. First, there are 8 key questions that founders and leadership teams must work through collaboratively to establish your vision. Second is ensuring that the vision is shared by all, only then will your crew be crossing the same ocean.

I thought this was great: To define your core values, have each senior member list three colleagues who, if you could clone them, would lead you to market leadership. Together, list all of the qualities these people exemplify and as a group in debate, decide on three to seven that are most important to the business. These are your core values.

Lesson 2: Get the right people in the right seats

Jim Collins made this idea very popular in his bestseller Good to Great.

The right people are the ones who share your company's values. They fit and thrive in your culture. You enjoy being around these team members and they make the organisation a better place to be.

The right seat means that each of your employees is operating within their area of greatest skill and passion and that the responsibilities of each team member fits their unique ability. Put simply, your unique ability is a skill that when exercised you feel energised rather than drained.

If you want to realise your company's vision you must have all the right people operating in their unique abilities. This may take restructuring, hiring, and firing, but is said to be essential to your organisation's ability to achieve its objectives and thrive. Both Wickman and Collins note that having the wrong people in the right seats or vice versa is detrimental to success both for the organisation and for the misplaced employee.

“Life is much easier for everyone when you have people around you who genuinely get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it.”

Lesson 3: Anything that is measured and watched, improves

That's from Bob Parsons, an American entrepreneur and billionaire. It provides the foundation for the third component of Wickman's operating system - data.

Identify the list of numbers that if tracked, allow you to have an absolute pulse on your business. List the one person who is accountable for each number, usually your departmental heads, and ensure this team member is accountable for hitting the number they are responsible for. Record the data every week on a scorecard. In Wickman's first business, he had fourteen numbers - from weekly revenue to number of customer problems.

Following this, you should aim to boil the organisation's numbers down to the point where every employee has a single meaningful, measurable, and achievable number to guide them in their work. Every employee should have responsibilities that can be measured and tracked. Numbers cut through subjectivity, create accountability, give clarity, prompt competition, and importantly, produce results.

Lesson 4: Identify, discuss, and solve your issues (IDS)

The ability to address and solve organisational difficulties as they develop is the next component of gaining traction. It's human nature to postpone difficult decisions because they are difficult. Naturally, this holds you back.

Successful people and successful companies are good at solving their problems. The first step to joining this crew is creating an issues list, this is the one place where all of your issues are captured by all of your leadership team.

Next is the IDS process. Clearly identify and state the root causes of your issues, this will dramatically reduce your issues list as apparent problems cluster together, before deciding the three that are most critical. Discuss the issues, everyone should say what they have to say about the issue and should only say it once. Finally, solve your issues, create an action item that fixes the problem and decide who will be accountable for its completion.

Lesson 5: Document your process

Identify your core processes for each function.

Document the processes, following the 80/20 rule - only write down the 20 percent that produces 80 percent of the results.

Ensure it is followed by all - manage your people because following process is important and often understated.

Lesson 6: Set quarterly goals

Create a 90-day world by establishing the three to seven most important priorities for the business, for the upcoming quarter. This allows your team to avoid one of the most frustrating issues in business - feeling overwhelmed by a monumental task. Big goals can and should do this to you, quarterly goals should not.

Everyone in your organisation should then follow the same process, with organisational leaders also committing to achieving their most important three to seven, with everyone else having one to three.

Don't set the wrong goals, make sure they are pointed in the right direction and are aligned with the big picture, and don't overwhelm responsibility by setting too many.

If my intro wasn't clear enough in opinion - yes, you should read this book.

It’s great.