Growing with Traction

Over the past year, Don’t Panic Labs has been shifting toward a different method of focusing our meetings, leadership, and growth by implementing EOS Traction. As part of this, our leadership team meets every week for an L10 Meeting. As part of these meetings, we recap the employee and company Headlines from the previous week, many of which are bubbled up from smaller department level meetings (at DPL, we refer to these as “sewing circles”).

Recently, we discovered we had a couple bad habits we’re trying to break.

Our first tendency is to IDS (identify, discuss, and solve) many of the negative comments that appeared in our Headlines. Unfortunately, this meant we were often discussing these issues with only one person’s perspective on the issue. And without all of the relevant people involved, we weren’t truly able to solve the problem. Even worse, it meant we were talking about people without them being there to represent themselves.

Our second tendency was to forward the issue on to the appropriate smaller group. Often, the person(s) in that group who were involved with the issue were hearing about it for the first time in their next group meeting. And, we still might not have everyone involved actually in the room together. So that wasn’t setting us up for a very successful discussion.

After we identified these two habits, we began trying something different. If we recognize a potential issue that involves parties not in the room, we create a To Do for the person who is accountable for that area to gather the necessary people — those who have the knowledge and responsibility to identify the root issue — to discuss and propose a solution.

When the To Do is complete, the accountable person reports back on the solution that was identified so we can all move forward.

We are hopeful that this will reduce misunderstandings and improve communication among our team members. As an added bonus, we also have more time in our leadership L10 meetings to discuss topics that affect the business as a whole (which is the main purpose of our meeting).

We still feel like we’re learning how to best implement EOS Traction in our company and culture. If your company is using EOS Traction, what have you been able to improve meetings and communication?

Stay tuned to read about what we continue to discover in our journey.