What will grow the business next? The question busy Leadership Teams miss

A great Leadership Team can make a company better every quarter and still not make it bigger.

Teams that run on EOS® know the rhythm. The L10 meeting starts on time, the Issues List gets worked, and the Rocks get finished. The business is stronger than it was a year ago. The harder question is whether it is taking more ground financially.

Why growth can get missed

Leadership Teams are full of capable people doing the work in front of them. Maximizing growth or finding the growth in your data might not be their focus. That is a real strength. It is also why growth can wait. When every week brings real issues, the urgent takes the place of the advancing conversation. We wrote about that pull in False urgency: why busy Leadership Teams lose sight of growth.

Peter Drucker drew a useful line here. Solving a problem brings a business back to normal. Turning an opportunity into results is what moves it forward. A team can get very good at the first and never get to the second.

Nobody failed. Growth has no natural owner in the weekly rhythm, and the levers are hard to see in the data, so it waits its turn. We cover that in Why the growth levers are hard to see in your data.

When fixing should come first

Sometimes a team is in crisis. Cash is tight, a key person has left, or a major client is at risk. In that season a growth conversation would be out of place, and fixing comes first. Most quarters are not like that, and those are the quarters this question is for.

The question to add

Put one question on the agenda. What will grow the business next? Said another way, what is the next thing we need to focus on to grow financially?

Gary Keller asks a similar question in The ONE Thing. His version looks for the one action that makes everything else easier or unnecessary. For a Leadership Team, the answer is often a Growth Lever, with one owner and a date.

Try this before your next quarterly

1. Write it down. Each member of the Leadership Team privately writes the one thing the business most needs to keep growing in the next 90 days.
2. Collect before talking. Gather the answers before anyone speaks.
3. Read them side by side. See where they match and where they don't.

If the answers match, you have a strong Rock candidate and a fast start. We cover how to choose one in How to choose Rocks that close the gap to plan. If the answers don't match, that is your first agenda item, and it is often a more useful conversation than the next item on the Issues List.

Different answers do not mean anyone is wrong. A team can agree on the plan and still hold different views on what comes first.

What a Dashboard adds

Opinions are the usual way to answer. A Dashboard built from your own data adds a second input. It shows where revenue and the few key Growth Levers stand against your Growth Plan, along with the trend and forecast, so the team can see whether it is taking more ground and which Growth Lever to aim at. A forecast is a projection, not a promise, but it gives the team something to check its answer against.

One question for your next meeting

When did your Leadership Team last spend a meeting on what will grow the business next?

To see how your company compares, take the Growth Benchmark. It takes about two minutes.