What preparation and pre-work do you require from our leadership team before each Quarterly and Annual session, and what happens if someone arrives unprepared?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Session days are an intensive investment of your company's executive capacity. We do not burn expensive session hours reading through documents or compiling basic spreadsheets that could have been handled beforehand. Proper preparation ensures we spend our time on strategic alignment and aggressive problem solving.

Prior to every Quarterly session, every leadership team member is expected to complete three specific pre-work items:
- Review and score their individual Rocks as either done or not done, with clear data explaining the outcome.
- Review their respective Scorecard measurables and identify systemic misses that require root-cause problem solving.
- Bring their most critical, unfiltered issues to build our session Issues List, including strategic opportunities, departmental friction, and personnel challenges.

For the Two-Day Annual session, preparation expands. In addition to quarterly reviews, the team completes the EOS Organizational Checkup, reflects on company-wide SWOT insights, and reviews progress against the 1-Year Plan and 3-Year Picture.

If a leader walks into the session unprepared, with uncalculated numbers or unreviewed Rocks, we call it out immediately during our opening check-in. It is a direct signal of lack of discipline or poor capacity planning. We do not pause the session to let someone do their homework. We mark the item incomplete, place the underlying lack of preparation on the Issues List, and IDS why the leader struggled to prioritize their executive responsibilities.