Delegate and Elevate™

EOS uses it on leaders whose seats have outgrown them, which in a growing company is most of them at some point. The list is written for a real week rather than an ideal one, and the bottom quadrant is handed over first. What usually comes back is the case for a hire, which then becomes a Rock with a name against it.

Founders tend to describe their problem as time, which points at solutions about calendars. Sorting the actual list usually shows something different: two days a week of work they are mediocre at and quietly dread. Moving that work is a bigger change than any productivity habit, and it is visible enough that a team can hold them to it.

Worked example: The owner of a forty-person cleaning business filled in the boxes and found scheduling and invoicing sitting in the bottom quadrant, about eleven hours a week. She had been calling it admin for years. The hire was an office coordinator at a salary that looked expensive until the eleven hours were priced against her selling time.

Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on People; Rocket Fuel®, Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters