Over the last several months, businesses have been impacted by COVID-19 in many ways. Some industries have been impacted more severely than others. Across the board, businesses have had to act and adjust like never before. Joe Paulsen with Pinnacle Business Traction would like to help you with ensuring that your company has the Traction it needs to overcome current and future challenges.The following is part five of a guest blog series where Joe will share tips on how you can gain traction in difficult times.  

Great companies are very good at solving their issues.  They don’t conceal them or run away from them.  They actually look for and encourage Issues because they know that they can solve them.  The only issues they can’t solve are the ones they don’t know about.  During the last ten months, Issues have been coming at us at an alarming pace.  You can’t solve them all and some are more impactful than others.  It is important to keep them in perspective by prioritizing the ones that must be solved and holding off on the ones that can wait to be solved the following week or quarter.  Once you have prioritized the most urgent issues, we need to drill down to get to the root cause.  

Many times when an issue is brought out, we discuss, explain, defend, commiserate, tell stories, but we rarely identify the true root cause of the issue.  This is typically what consumes our time in our meetings and we never get around to actually solving the issue.  I.D.S. is the EOS® Issues Solving Track™ that instills the discipline necessary to first Identify the root cause.  This step will take more time at the front end, but it will ultimately save you time because your team won’t get distracted focusing on symptoms and telling stories that may not be relevant to the real issue.  Once the root cause is Identified, then we move to Discussion.  This ensures that everyone’s voice has been heard and to ensure that we are focused on the most probable root cause.  Once there is agreement on the most probable root cause, we now list all possible Solutions.  

Joe Paulsen (Meet Joe) and Pinnacle Business Traction’s passion is to Enrich the Lives of Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders in the Mankato area.  He has been implementing EOS since 2016 and has helped over 35 entrepreneurial organizations get everything they want from their organizations.  Please reach out to him if you are wanting more information or assistance.  [email protected] 

GMG is offering the best-selling book Traction – Get a Grip on Your Business to members wanting to learn more about the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Please email [email protected] to schedule a time to pick-up your free copy at the GMG office.