We are seeing great results with EOS® at the leadership team level after just one quarter and want to roll it out to our entire organization immediately. How do we know if our leadership team is truly ready to cascade these tools down, or if we are moving too fast?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Cascading EOS to the rest of your organization too quickly is one of the most common mistakes eager leadership teams make. You experience the clarity of your first quarterly meeting and want your entire staff to feel that same energy. But rolling out the tools before your leadership team has mastered them will create confusion, cynicism, and operational chaos.

Before you cascade the tools to the next level of management, your leadership team must meet three strict criteria.

- First, you must have at least two consecutive quarters of highly effective Level 10 Meetings. Your team should be identifying and solving real issues consistently, starting and ending on time, and rating the meetings an eight or higher.
- Second, your Accountability Chart must be fully settled and accepted. If you still have leadership team members in the wrong seats, or if there is lingering political tension at the top, cascading will only magnify those issues.
- Third, you must be hitting at least eighty percent of your leadership team Rocks. If the leaders cannot execute their own quarterly priorities, they have no business teaching department managers how to do it.

A premature rollout looks like a management fad to your employees. They will watch you introduce tools and then abandon them when things get busy. Wait until your leadership team is a healthy, aligned, and disciplined unit. Only then should you introduce the tools to your department managers, sequencing the rollout one layer at a time.