Pendant decided to implement EOS earlier this year. It’s an entire management system that helps your team constructively address all of the critical areas of the business.  According to our implementer, Bill Stratton, we’ve done a great job of very quickly making EOS part of our DNA, and we are now in the midst of rolling it out to entire team. It takes committed effort and lots of repetition, especially of terms that were completely unfamiliar in the beginning.

Our objective in adopting EOS is to create a management system that, executed properly, helps us create clear short, medium, and long term goals, focuses our entire team, builds in accountability, and ultimately makes us better, consistently.

We use many different EOS tools to accomplish the above, but one of the most important is known as the Level 10 meeting. Our leadership team has been holding Level 10s since the summer, and recently we rolled out Level 10s to every department, such that everyone is participating in a Level 10 meeting each week.

The Level 10 meeting for our leadership team is every Tuesday from 9 to 10:30 am. That’s every, as in we never miss the meeting. There are two legitimate reasons for an individual to miss the meeting – vacation or something approaching death.

The meeting starts on time, and ends on time. And the agenda is identical, every week. It looks like this:

• Segue (5 minutes) – each attendee shares one personal best and one business best from the prior week.
• Scorecard (5 minutes) – we review the leadership team scorecard, consisting of key measurables .
• Rock Review (5 minutes) – a quick review of the status of “Rocks”, which are the most important items that have to get done each quarter.
• Customer/Employee Headlines (5 minutes) – each person shares news items that the rest of the team may not have heard.
• To Do List (5 minutes) – a review of items created at the previous Level 10 that need to be completed in one week or less.
• IDS (60 minutes) – the heart of the meeting.  Identify, Discuss, Solve addresses issues that most often come out of the review of the Scorecard and Rocks, but any issue can be added to the list. The first step is to prioritize the issues, and then discuss and put in a plan to solve them.  Most of the To Dos come out of the IDS discussion.
• Conclude (5 minutes) – the conclusion includes recapping the new To Dos, identifying “Cascading Messages” to be conveyed to the rest of the Pendant team, and rating the quality of the meeting on a scale from 1-10. The goal of course is 10, thus the name “Level 10”.

If you examine the agenda, you can see the built-in accountability and focus that arise from committing to this approach.  The Level 10 process has proven to be a cure for one of our key issues. Prior to adopting EOS, our leadership team meetings were chock full of great ideas, stimulating debates, digressions (one of Michael’s favorite terms), and “conquer the world” outcomes (at least in intent). Everyone would leave the room feeling charged up, but then life would intervene and we would lose momentum. The Level 10 process prevents us from losing focus on the great ideas we create. We still have the highly productive discussions, but the required follow-up stays on the radar, and more gets done.

What’s the end game? The real end game is a team that consistently gets better at what we do, so in that sense there isn’t an end to it. But look out world – prepare to be conquered.