Julia Langkraehr’s Blog

traction or vision

What’s first? Traction or vision?

One of the favourite sayings of EOS implementers is “Vision without traction is merely hallucination.”

Vision and Traction are two of the elements, along with Healthy, which make up the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

  1. Vision: ensuring everyone shares the same outlook on where your organisation is heading, and how it will get there.
  2. Traction: bringing discipline through responsibility and accountability, so you can execute to achieve every part of your vision
  3. Healthy: help them become a healthy, functional, cohesive leadership team, because unfortunately, leaders don’t always function well as a team

Which should come first – traction or vision?

Many believe that their first priority should be to establish a vision for their business.

However, in my experience, the best strategy is to concentrate on gaining traction first.

After all, you’re unlikely to fulfil your vision if you don’t have the right team or the right processes in place to make it a reality.

You need to focus first on the “who” and the “how”, before tackling the question of “what”.

This means employing the right team and putting systems in place to ensure they take responsibility and are accountable and embedding the right processes in your business to make it run efficiently.

Businesses which use the Entrepreneurial Operating System put in place a whole range of tools which help them to gain this traction. These include:

  • accountability charts to track the numbers in the business
  • regularly reviewed Rocks to keep people focused on their key priorities
  • weekly meetings to update the entire team on progress and keep them aligned

Once you have traction, then you have a solid basis to execute on your vision.

To find out how to apply EOS to your business, contact our team today on +44 (0)7795 667480 or email us here, for a complimentary 90-minute consultation introducing the system to you and your leadership team.