Glossary
Six Key Components™
The Six Key Components are the parts of a business EOS® says every leadership team has to strengthen: vision, people, data, issues, process and traction. They are worked on as a set, because weakness in any one of them shows up as a symptom somewhere else rather than where it started.
01
How the Six Key Components are used
Every EOS tool belongs to one component, and the organizational checkup scores all six so a team can see which one is dragging. Most companies come in strong on vision and weak on data and process. Sessions in the first year usually go to the two lowest scores, whatever the founder's favorite happens to be.
Naming the six turns a vague sense that something is off into a location. A leadership team that says the business feels chaotic can usually agree, once the six are scored, that the chaos lives in process and issues. That is a fixable statement, and it stops the same meeting circling for another quarter.
Worked example: A software firm of forty people scored eighty on vision and thirty-five on process. Nothing about the strategy was wrong. Onboarding a customer took between two and nine weeks depending on who ran it, and every escalation reached the same two engineers. The following two quarters went into writing down six processes and getting everybody onto them.
Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on the Six Key Components; eosworldwide.com/what-is-eos
EOS Model®
The EOS Model is the one-page diagram of the whole system: six components arranged in the order a leadership team is meant to strengthen them.
02Organizational Checkup
The Organizational Checkup is a twenty-question survey that scores how strongly a company is running each of the six components, out of a hundred.
03Traction
Traction is the EOS word for the discipline and accountability that turn a plan into finished work, and it is the sixth of the six components.
04KPIs: what they are, how many to track, and which matter
A practical guide to key performance indicators for small companies: definitions, leading vs lagging measures, examples by department, and how many to track.
Start with a real question
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