Leveraging Leadership

Implementing EOS for Aligning Strategic Prioritization and Employee Motivation

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 159

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This episode of Leveraging Leadership features Claire Podulka, Chief of Staff at TXI, who discusses prioritization as a key part of business leadership. Claire shares how TXI uses the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) to set and align business goals, and explains strategies for keeping a 70-person organization on track. She also highlights the importance of understanding personal motivations and maintaining accountability, with examples of how her team navigates decision-making and goal-setting.

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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

04:22 Setting and Aligning Goals with EOS
07:43 Establishing Long-term Goals
12:16 Weekly Leadership Check-ins
13:23 Adjusting Priorities and Dealing with Challenges
16:46 Consent Over Consensus in Decision Making
24:20 Leadership Meeting Structure
31:11 Cascading Communication
35:54 Prioritization and Emotional Intelligence

Emily:

Welcome back to leveraging leadership. My guest today is Claire Padolka and she is the chief of staff at TXI. And we are going to deep dive into a topic that is near and dear to chief of staff hearts everywhere, which is prioritization. But before we deep dive into today's topic, I wanted to give a special shout out to Claire Amah. Who is the founder and CEO of Ask a Chief of Staff. She has been on this show, episode 66, if you want to check that out. But she reached out to me and asked if I would be open to speaking to someone who would be a great guest for the show. And I said, yes. Enter Claire. And so, Claire, could you just take a moment and maybe talk about your experience with Ask a Chief of Staff and the resources they have there? Ask

Claire:

a Chief of Staff is a fantastic show. Community for chiefs of staff, whether current, like myself or aspiring and definitely want to echo that shout out to Clara. She is the heart and soul of that community. Um, and it truly feels like a community. I don't even know the count of, uh, how many members we are 400 or so, I would say, but you feel connected. It's such a supportive place where folks ask questions and give each other that look of. Have you experienced this I've experienced this and then we can all nod and say, yeah, you're not alone because chief of staff can be such a lonely role that you find that connection and support in that community. Um, yeah. Huge. Thank you to Clara for all of her support of me over the past year or so. And just, yeah, a fantastic community to be part of.

Emily:

Beautiful. Thank you. So can you start with an overview of TXI? What does your company do? How is the team set up? All of that good stuff.

Claire:

Absolutely. TXI is a digital product agency and we specialize primarily in data products for manufacturing and logistics companies. Although we do a smattering of everything from time to time. Um, we're a team of about 70 these days, engineers, designers, strategists, delivery experts. We are headquartered in Chicago, although we're really remote first. We've got folks across the U. S. and Canada, a few people in Europe and South America, and we've been around for almost 25 years now, and very proudly, we are 100 percent employee owned.

Emily:

Oh, wow. Okay. Very cool. Okay. So with that backdrop, as I mentioned, prioritization is just a common conversation with chiefs of staff. You know, what should I be prioritizing? How can I best prioritize my principal and team and all that good stuff? So we want to get into some tactical and practical ways to approach this. And I know that your company uses EOS. So if, for those listeners who might not be familiar with that, can you explain what that is and how TXI uses that to help with prioritization?

Claire:

Um, EOS is huge for us when it comes to prioritization, accountability, the whole gamut. Um, so to back up EOS stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. And as you can kind of infer from the phrase operating system in there, it's a really comprehensive framework for running a business. What I like about it is that it's very clear and it's very pragmatic. Like a lot of chiefs of staff, I want to have something that I can like Pick up and use, like, here's the EOS absolutely gives that to you, um, for everything from like planning prioritization accountability. Um, you know, as chiefs of staff are often the ones who are leading the operating rhythm of the business and EOS just provides you a road map for that operating rhythm as well as like, some guidelines for how to plan work, like, by year by quarter, literally by week, um, and maintain accountability and alignment. For all of that, so basically, it helps you connect the dots up and down the stack of your year.

Emily:

So with that said, how do you keep everyone across a 70 person organization aligned? Are there communication channels that you have set up? Are there certain cadences that you guys check in on your EOS goals or tasks?

Claire:

Yeah. So EOS gives you a framework for all of that. Um, so it starts really with the leadership team and thinking about how do we want to prioritize for our business. So think first of like, what are the big enduring goals? Like, literally evergreen, this is our mission. This is our purpose. What do we go for? And then break that down. Literally, there's like a 10 year, a 3 year, a 1 year, all of that gets, gets layered in and the leadership team sets those goals. However, that cascades throughout the organization, right? So I want to embed those goals within everything we communicate. The annual goals, for example, provide the structure for when we go to the business every quarter, we have a state of the business meeting. Those annual goals are the agenda state of the business. We literally say, okay, our number 1 goal for the year is focused. Here's the progress that we're making help us all be accountable to that. So everyone in the company, every single month is seeing here are the goals reiterated. Here's the progress against the goals. Here's the blockers, right? Here's where we've stumbled. Here are the challenges. So that everyone in the business from the CEO to, you know, an associate designer all has that exact same context.

Emily:

Okay. So you mentioned the leadership team comes up with these goals. Can you just walk us through, are you, is that an offsite brainstorming? Are you involved in facilitating that? What does that part of it look like?

Claire:

Yes. We set annual goals at the beginning of the year. So no stranger, uh, to that. And then we sent literally quarterly, what EOS calls rocks that ladder up to those annual goals. And those are, Typically at off sites, so we'll take the leadership team offline at the beginning of the year. We take 2 days just because there's a lot more to dive into and we find ourselves a space where we can get together physically in person. We're often remote when we're working together, but really being together in the room, you know, it can make such a difference when it comes to buy in when it comes to, let's really get everything out there and make sure that. Are we really saying the same thing? Um, so we go and we have, uh, an offsite for a couple of days and we essentially put all of the big ideas out there on the table. We start and we think really generatively and we think really broad. What are all of the ways that we can move our business forward first and then narrow it down really through collaborative discussion, pushing and pulling on those ideas. Um, And refining and refining until it's just, what are the most essential pieces that will drive our business again toward that 3 year goal toward that 10 year target toward those enduring, you know, purpose that we have making sure all of that still stays into alignment. Um, and some of the ideas are great ideas that simply don't fit, right? Some of those ideas are just like, that's actually not what we're aiming for right now. And so we need to set them aside Or we need to reconsider those bigger picture goals.

Emily:

Right. So you mentioned the annual goals roll up to 10 year and 3 year. How are, how is the 10 year and 3 year one established? Is that another offsite? Is that, uh, are we looking at metrics? What, what is, what are those comprised of?

Claire:

Those are really established, um, we have established them in the past and then we evolve them year over year. Okay. So for example, for us, this, this is actually the first year we've ever had a 10 year target okay. Um, I will say in the past, we thought 10 years, how can we possibly see 10 time. Right? And it seems, it seems like a mythical point in time, but that's actually okay. It's directional, right? This is directionally correct. So for us, our 10 year target is that we want to enable a million people to harness the power of their data. A million people, that seems very enormous number. Every single person in our company can hear that align to it and say, okay, here's my 5 people over here. Here's my, you know, 25, 000 people over here and everybody can contribute and understand that, um, gets everybody. Thinking in the same direction oriented correctly, even if it's not like it's the number actually going to be 1, 000, 010 years. That's not the point. The point is, let's get everybody inspired and rallied around a point on a compass that we can head toward.

Emily:

Yeah, it's a north star. It's inspirational.

Claire:

Of course. Then the three year goal becomes, okay, so what are some of the specific mechanisms that we're going to use to get there? What's the thing that we can get our hands around a little bit faster. So for us, it has to do with really becoming known around data products, becoming a more expert in some of the particular target markets that we're aiming for, which then contributes to. Right. Those people, all of that ladders up together.

Emily:

So it's like brand awareness is in that level. It sounds like, um, adding value and, and being more informed about your target market segments, all of that stuff's kind of in the three year bucket.

Claire:

All of that sits in the three year bucket. We get more tactical around, um, uh, who do we want to be hiring? How do we want to be hiring? There are some more specific metrics around that because again, each of those people that we pull in to our organization will continue to contribute as we grow. Our impact in the world grows as well.

Emily:

Yes, that's interesting. So strategic hires would be in that bucket because if, for instance, if you're bringing on like a C level executive, for your timeline, you know, depending on the role, it might take them 12 months to get fully ramped into that.

Claire:

Yeah. And that's why all of these different time horizons are so helpful because you're, you're laddering up, right? What we do this week influences what we do this quarter influences what we do this year and so on and so forth.

Emily:

Okay. Okay. So it ladders up and then you do your beginning of the year planning, two day offsite, and you've got your annual goals and then you break them up into quarters. It sounds like, and you have a state of the business where is that an all company meeting or is that with leadership? What does that look like?

Claire:

The state of the business is for our entire company. So those folks who are owning the annual priorities and anybody who is contributing to them has a moment to share out. Here's our progress. And we're very transparent again, partly because we're an employee owned company, partly because this is just. A way to maintain accountability, right? And keep alignment across everyone. We're very transparent about here's where we're making progress. And actually, here's where we're falling short and what we're going to do about it. So we're able to go to the business and say, uh, you know, our, our first rock around focus, this is on track, our rock around generative AI, actually not, we're not on track right now. And here's what we're going to do about it. So trying to maintain that accountability month over month to everyone in the business.

Emily:

Okay, so some of those, Enduring goals for you are, is it focus and AI? Are those kind of two that you have in play now?

Claire:

Yes.

Emily:

Okay. Okay. So we talked about those. And then is there any check in between quarters? Is the quarterly kind of the big state of the business rollout to the entire team? Are you in the leadership team? Or management checking in more frequently than that,

Claire:

the leadership team checks in literally every week. Um, so again, part of part of the process is that you are making traction, you're making progress every single week. And what that looks like for us is, um, meet for. 90 minutes every single week as a full team. And while we have many items on the agenda, whatever's coming up in the business, uh, key points we need to debate, um, decision points that need to be made, we do have some time to check in on our rocks on those key priorities. Every single week. Um, and we don't do like a full status readout. That's not a great use of synchronous time, but even to have five minutes every week, we're the full leadership team. Like literally looking one another in the eye and saying, Okay, everybody's updated. Are you on track or not? And if you're not on track, okay, now we're going to dig a little bit deeper. Tell us why. Um, is it that something else got put on your plate? Should it be on your plate? Or should we delegate that or defer that? Is the deprioritize this rock? Um, I'll say that that's not something that, uh, we had always done explicitly folks would sort of implicitly deprioritize their rocks because they would something more important would come up, right? We don't always get these things, right? We have to adjust to reality. We have to accept to do information and incorporate that. But as an example, we had a member of our team last quarter, and we broke 1 of our own rules. We had, we had this person own 2 rocks. We know that doesn't work, right? Nobody can have 2 priorities. You can only have 1 priority priority is singular. And this person had 2 and 1 was really externally facing. And the other was internally facing as we got started. You know, the external facing 1 just wasn't making the same progress. And that was our first clue that, oh, okay, this is too much and these priorities are not actually equal. And then there was a shift in that person's role where suddenly the internal work had a really specific timeline. If we want to get the full value out of this work, you must complete this rock this quarter. And the other one, okay, it's externally facing, so of course it's valuable, but there's not the same kind of hard timeline on it. So, we made the call. Okay, do you prioritize the external rock focus on the internal rock? Make sure you nail that 1 that 1's got to get done. And then this external 1 will keep. And so now it's a new quarter, he's picked up that new. Previously deprioritized rock. He can pick that up now. His role has shifted to be like fully externally aligned. Now the work and the person and the priority are all in alignment.

Emily:

Okay. So it sounds like you were considering timing elements. And then when you make that switch, is that, what does that conversation look like? Who says, okay, you put that rock down and you, Go all in on this one because we have to get it done by a certain drop dead date. Is that a conversation with the whole team? Is that the CEO saying this, this and this? How does that work

Claire:

for us? What that looks like is a conversation among those folks who are actually going to be impacted by it. And because we were talking about the difference in priority between two rocks, it really did wind up being basically the full leadership team had different perspectives on it. We had that conversation really openly. In our weekly leadership team meeting, we talked it through and talked about the relative priorities, the relative timelines, the, um, the resources that were available. We talked about would it make sense to delegate 1 of these rocks to someone else? And the answer is no, actually, this 1 person is the best suited to lead both of these efforts, but they simply can't happen simultaneously. So, we talked about all of those different impacts, and then, um, ultimately the, the person who owns, uh, those decisions for us, because it's talking about how we allocate our resources is our. So, he would make that call, um, and in this case, it was, it was a pretty clear agreement that yes, of course, these 2 things are both valuable. But at this moment, we are going to choose the internal priority, even over the external priority.

Emily:

Okay, so there's a big discussion about it. Most of the time the group can get there. If a tie break is needed, in this particular case, it would be the COO.

Claire:

Yes. And I think knowing who that final decision maker is, is such an important thing, especially for chiefs of staff, because we know it's not us, right? The chief of staff is never the one who actually owns the formal authority, but we have to know the lay of the land. Like, who is the person who owns that? Um, It's never my 1st move to say, okay, um, I'm just going to hand it to this person. Like, no discussion needed. We want to get there through discussion, but the model that we use is consent. Over consensus, the consensus, right? Takes so long to get to and really consensus means no one is exactly happy, right? It means that everybody is a little unhappy when we get there and it's taken a long time and it's, it's probably like, led to a lot of churn in, in my experience, consensus can lead to a lot of churn by using a model of consent. The question is not, have we all really digested and agreed on this? It's, can you live with this? And often, if we're putting forth a proposal and the leadership team is relatively. Functional and high trust and aligned, and we're all aligned to the. Primary goals of the business, we can make a rational case and say, okay, it wouldn't have been my 1st choice. Maybe 1 person on our team really wanted that external priority. To take to take the priority there, but overall, we made the case. Okay. I can consent to that. I can agree to that. I can live with that. And that really then calls out when you can't live with it. Oh, it's not just not my preference. It's something that actually, I strongly disagree with. And here's my reason why, and I'm going to stand up and say, no.

Emily:

Yeah, I like that. Is this a deal breaker or like, can we just keep moving here? That's a great approach to take and I remember so I had similar we didn't use eos, but we had similar discussions around All right. Let's talk about you know cross department dependencies and what this means for the business overall And one thing that I found helped the team is reminding them that in that environment, they, we were the leadership team. So it wasn't, Oh, your operations and Oh, your product and Oh, your finance. Yes. Of course they had their functional groups, but now we're making a decision for what's best for the business and what's best for this leadership team. And just reminding people of that lens, help them get to some good discussion points and answers. So I'm wondering if that comes into play for you at all.

Claire:

Yes. I think that's a big piece of it is the. We are functioning as a team and that we do have these mutual goals that we are all accountable to and making sure that we are tying our work and really our investments. If you think it. Every definition of investment, right? Of course, financial investment, but time investment, energy, investment, attention and investment, all of that should be tied back to what we've said are the goals for the business. And if it's not, then there's a different question of either, are you misaligned with the goals of this business or are the goals of the business wrong? Has something changed? Right? And we always need to accept that the world is changing around us, right? Totally. Businesses are changing and evolving. We learn more every day. And so there is this interesting push and pull to navigate of, we've set goals. We don't want to change them just randomly on a Tuesday. We can't be changing and churning constantly, but sometimes they do need to change and they should never be set in stone. We should never just throw up our hands and say, well, it's the goal we set. There's nothing we can do about it. We're just humans working together. We're just running a business. Nothing, no one else, particularly actually as an employee owned company. We don't have anybody as like outside, uh, you know, investors, stakeholders, no outside capital is dictating what we must do. It's the 70 of us. Right. And then, you know, the more specifically just the, the 10 of us on a leadership team saying, this is where we want to take this business. We have to consider all these other factors, but this is our choice.

Emily:

That's a great point. So how do you determine if something is quote unquote wrong or perhaps, you know, it was right at the time and priorities or environment has changed and now you want to update it? How does, how does that decisioning process go?

Claire:

That is something that. I think every leadership team faces, and I'm thinking of an example for us from pretty recently, we were for the first time as a business, a couple of years ago, we decided to focus on a couple of verticals. Historically, TX, I had been generalists, very proud generalists, and we would have a bunch of different clients in our portfolio. And we started for the first time to focus in key verticals just a couple of years ago. And we chose. 1 being manufacturing and logistics, and then another being health care, and we pursued both. And as we pursued both, there was clear, like, values, alignment and opportunity and success that we were finding in the manufacturing space. You know, it's an industry that is often been left behind by innovation. We think we can really make a difference. There's a lot of, like, small, medium sized businesses that aren't getting the attention. Okay. There's like, there's some real traction here. Healthcare was not the same story for us. Healthcare, we found a ton of more experienced competition than us. Frankly, we found a really saturated market. We found a ton of small, small startups that didn't really meet the scale that we were looking for. And, but we'd set a plan, right? These are the two verticals that we are pursuing. But as we experimented, and as we learn more, we're like, actually manufacturing is the big opportunity and healthcare is not the right fit for us right now. So we had a whole series of conversations and we're pulling in, of course, the data from our marketing team, from our sales team of like, what do the relative traction for the investment that we're making look like Here? We're pulling in information from our delivery teams of what is the experience of actually working on these products like, and how much impact are you making with your clients? What is the relationship with the clients, you know, what's the account strategy look like here? We're pulling in external market data and pulling all of these pieces together to have what wound up being like some very vigorous debate because there's interesting pieces to both of these verticals, right? We didn't choose them for no reason, but ultimately, as a smaller company, we have to focus if we really want to grow our business, the way that we hope to and splitting the focus based on the results we were seeing didn't make sense anymore.

Emily:

Wow. I love that your team makes these decisions because a lot of companies and teams just go, we'll do it all. And we'll spread ourselves so thin that we're not doing any of it. Well, but it seems like you're very deliberate with, with your goals and what you're asking people to do, which is fantastic. So let's say it's a normal leadership meeting. Check in you're meeting every week for 90 minutes and that portion of the meeting where you check in on your EOS goals or tasks, how does that normally run? Like how, like, how does that go?

Claire:

It tends to be very, very brief. And the reason is that the legwork that I do in advance, I think all chiefs of staff know you've got to be working behind the scenes all the time. Yes. So at this moment we have four rocks. Each of them has their own owner. Um, I own one of them. So the check in for that is real quick. It's just me checking in with myself and say, did you actually do the things you committed to the check? Yup. And then. I always ping the folks who own those other rocks before the meeting. Literally got space on my calendar every Monday morning to check in and make sure that those folks is like, quick ping on Slack. You know, Hey, did you update your rock for this week? And that just makes life so much easier because we do have that moment of accountability where it's the 10 of us looking at each other. And if somebody can show up and like their updates already there, everybody's had a chance to preview it. And then my question is just who has something they need help with or need or progress they need to share on their rocks. And if you've already done it, then you're feeling like, yeah, on top of everything, I've met my commitments to my team. I'm supporting the company. And if you haven't, then it can be kind of a feeling called out moment. Right. And you're thinking about how the individuals in the room are feeling, how the team is feeling connected. So, as chief of staff, I'm pinging folks in advance so that that moment is all everybody feeling I'm prepared. I've met my commitments and no 1 feeling called out or like, they fumbled or in some way everyone feels prepared. So that it's just like, check, check, check if everything's on track. Great. If somebody's not on track, they can very clearly say, here's why I'm not on track and what I plan to do about it, which is fine. That's not a failure. It's just a. Let me give you the real lay of the land so that everybody stays on the same page.

Emily:

Yes, and I think we use these things called flash reports. And so I think the point you made where everyone has the information beforehand. So it's not like you're sitting there reciting the statistics for that week because that's not a good use of time. So everyone would submit their portion of the flash report beforehand. Everyone else would have the opportunity to look at that beforehand, and then what we asked people to bring were items where you needed an answer or you had a question for another team member or some update that impacted all of the teams and sort of bring those and use that those topics for the discussion time, and that seemed to work very well because if someone Did read their flash report and had a question on someone else's like you mentioned, you know, you had you know 90 customers coming down the pipeline that's going to affect our delivery teams. They could ask, you know Sales guy how much of these are are real or how much are we are we being uh generous with their numbers that type of Discussion was, was more fruitful than literally just like reading off things. The other point you made, which I think is important is I wanted our team to have the most valuable discussion. So like that meaty cross department updates, things like that. Most of the time people were very, very good at getting their portion of the report in beforehand. We had, I'm not going to say names, but one particular member who just Could not for week after week after week get his stuff in and there did come a point where it was All right, you've had every opportunity There's no valid reason why you couldn't do this I am gonna have a little bit of a call out moment where it's like we'll call him Uh, Steve, you know, and Steve, it looks like you didn't update your flash report. Could you please provide the team? And it was a little bit of a moment in the meeting that was created on purpose. So I just, uh, appreciate that you tried to tee up your team and didn't try to call anyone out. Although I've used that strategically at times.

Claire:

Sometimes you have to, because again, there's, there's a reason why we do this work in teams and in groups. You need to use that for positive and for negative, right? Being a part of a team can be positively motivating. You want to show up, you want to meet your commitments, you want to achieve this thing together. And it can be negatively motivating too, of like, Ooh, I, I don't want to let anybody down. I don't want to have that moment of being the one with like clear clicks on to the next thing. And it's just a blank page. No one wants that moment.

Emily:

Yes. And you know, what I looked for in those meetings as well is when Someone would say, Hey, I haven't met, or I'm, I'm, I'm coming short on my goal for this week. And someone else would volunteer unsolicited. Oh, well that's because this and this and this didn't happen. Or that's because my team was late on getting you this. I'm like, that kind of discussion was music to my ears because then we were operating as a leadership team and it wasn't like mine and yours and us versus you, dah, dah, dah. It was, no, I see the whole picture. You have a dependency for my team and you didn't get what you needed in time. So it showed up on your portion of the flash report, but I'm just going to call out the reasons behind that. So stuff like that I loved or, you know, we're having a problem with this. Oh, I have a way to help you. Would you like some of my resources or would you like us to do this part differently on our, on our side for the next month or so? Like I loved listening for those types of things.

Claire:

I think those moments where this happened just the other day. Uh, the 1 person was running their rock and they had sort of 2 tracks of work within it. 1 was going along just fine. And the other 1, he was just like, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not getting the response from the team that I quite need. And then exactly that thing, another member of the team who has a closer tie. The, the sort of internal resource that he needed said, Oh, you know what? I've got to check in with him tomorrow. Let me just bring that up. And then I will own accountability for that person. And then they just figured out in the moment how to divide and conquer in a way that is absolutely, it's like the music to your ears when you're like, I am seeing a high performing team in action right now. I'm seeing ownership. I'm seeing mutual accountability. I'm showing I'm seeing collaboration. Really works more than the sum of its parts. Right.

Emily:

If I heard I own the accountability on that and I might cry like the chief of staff. That's amazing. Good job, Claire. Oh, my goodness. Okay. So we have these weekly leadership meetings. Is there any mechanism structure at at the mid? mid level manager level? Or is there anything else across the organization? Or is the leadership meeting the main one?

Claire:

The leadership meeting is the main one. We are structured in a way where each of our practices has its own internal management structure. So the heads of the practice sit on our leadership team, and then they have managers and then full staff, uh, sort of, uh, structured. In that way, and we do use the heads of practice and the managers to cascade communications. So if we make a big decision in the leadership team, if we're changing a priority, um, right now, we have, like, a new go to market campaign that we're putting out. And so we debated that among the leadership team, the chief commercial officer made a decision said, here's the, here's the campaign. Here's the plan. Here are the assets. And she cascades that to the heads of practice who can then break it down for their practices in those smaller groups and really they can share. Here's how this is relevant to you. So, our design team will have a slightly different angle on it, right? Then our engineers, or then our delivery managers within our strategists. The heads of practice can then speak the language of their practice and say, here's why this is relevant. Because that's going to make the communication so much smoother, right? People can buy into a priority when they understand what does this really mean for me? What's, what's my in on it? And then what do I do with this? Like, great, we've got this go to market campaign, but I'm sitting here working with my client day to day. Do I, how do I connect? And the heads of practice are great at providing the connective tissue and like connecting those dots for like, for our people, this is what this means.

Emily:

So the, so the heads make it clear and relevant to their individual team members based on their department and their role and their interaction with others. That makes so much sense because a lot of times I see that there's like leadership is clear, right? Like, Oh, we've talked about this and we've gone round and round. But like my frontline employee who is speaking with a customer is not privy to those conversations. So it doesn't know. So I think having line of sight to, okay, here's, The goals of the company. Here's why we're doing that. And here is my, here's how my day to day contributes to my department goal that rolls up to my company goal. I think that's hugely important because then if that individual is sitting on a call with a customer and they have like a decision to make, like, do I go this way or do I go that way? They can have that context in the back of their mind. So I love that your team rolls that out in the, in like a customized way per per individual and per team.

Claire:

This is all based on our own learnings. Uh, read failures in the past, right? We heard really loud and clear from our, from the employees at DXI. Like, Hey, we don't always understand why you're doing what you're doing. And it's not even like we don't buy it or this or that. It's like, we're not, we're just not even clear. And we got that feedback really clearly. And so we intentionally started to focus more, do fewer things. Reinforce them all the time. We're talking about it quarterly. We're talking about it at the state of the business. Your heads of practice are coming to you. We're cascading this information really repeatedly because. If folks don't have that consistency and everything that's underneath it, what's the rationale and what does this mean for me? Then, of course, they're going to get lost in the day to day. So I feel like it's important to own as chiefs of staff that it's not like we just show up 1 day and do everything perfectly. It's like, oh, yeah. Actually, I did this badly before and so I have learned and listened and now we're doing it better.

Emily:

Yes. And that's how we grow. So your heads of practice sound amazing, but hypothetically, if a head of practice wasn't conveying the information that was discussed down to their teams appropriately, how do you, um, how do you catch that or how do you, uh, course correct that type of behavior?

Claire:

We do employee pulse checks every quarter as well. So after we gather for A big quarterly gathering and we talk about all of our priorities and we have some time together. We check in and say, how are we doing? We check in about how are you feeling connected? Do you understand the vision? Is it motivating things like that? Pretty quick, like, 10 question pulse check that we administer and then we can hear loud and clear if folks are not connected to the vision or people are not understanding and we can also break it down by demographics. So, it's all anonymous, but we can still see. Oh, actually, it seems like, um, the designers are really, like, they're not feeling connected to the vision right now. I wonder why that is, for example.

Emily:

Okay. And when we talk about prioritization and accountability, there's the task side of it. And then you have mentioned, there's the emotional intelligence and understanding people's motivation. And that's a huge piece of this too. So can you talk about the role that that plays?

Claire:

Yes. Uh, empathy and emotional intelligence are just everything, I think in prioritization and accountability, because ultimately like, um, You can do all the math, right? I can say, okay, it is important for our business that we increase, uh, CGM by 10%. Why? Right? It's not going to stick with anybody. Like, just a percentage is this very abstract thing and if they're not meeting that goal, what are you going to do? Just like tap the spreadsheet again and be like, 10 percent no, you have to make it real for them depending on what they're motivated by. And so you think about, okay, if we increase DGM 10%, that means that we can. Uh, hire a new team member to expand our data engineering capability. And then all of a sudden, you're not talking about, like, a number on a spreadsheet and you're not talking about a percentage. You're talking about. a new teammate. You're talking about, uh, learning something new. You're talking about driving our business forward. And that brings it to a whole other level.

Emily:

Yes. I love that example. And I think also people's personal motivations. So for instance, if someone's like, I really want to make a good culture and I want my team members to look forward to coming to work each day and, and, you know, Someone else is thinking, Oh, they must be money motivated. Then they're kind of pulling on the wrong string. So it's like, okay, this person is, is concerned about this or has a priority around this. I have to understand that. So when I have a conversation with that person, I'm speaking their language.

Claire:

Yeah. I think the real example that comes to mind for me that just happened a couple of weeks ago is, so my principal is very personally attached to education. As just like a cause, uh, as a project, something he cares a lot about. I mean, we've worked together for like seven years at this point. So like any great chief of staff, I understand his motivations, like what he values and we had an education project come through our pipeline. But that's not really our focus as a business right now. Um, you know, we're focused on manufacturing. So I needed to go to him and say, I know that you want to jump on this. I know you care. It's, it is really important. Like that moment of validation, that moment of personal understanding. Of course you care about this. I care about this too, right? Connect to that. However, what we need is a business. Remember our goals, number 1 goal for the year, right? Focus on manufacturing, we need you, the CEO fully dive into that world. So, yes, this is in a vacuum. This would be great. We don't operate in a vacuum. We're operating in a context where we've set these goals. And so I know that your values align to this, but remember the values that we were supporting. When we decided on this kind of focus, and so you're still making the same connection to, oh, what's important to you is like doing good in the world. Yeah, okay. Here's a different way to do good in the world. We have to say no to this so that you can say yes. To this other thing that we've agreed on, and it's all about knowing that. And really down to a personal level, particularly for chiefs of staff, obviously, knowing your principle, what do they care about? What are they incented on? Um, what are they motivated by so that you can use that? Steer the business.

Emily:

Yes, love that example. Okay, so if we try to recap everything here for listeners, we've got the 10 year, this could be aspirational, inspirational, it's the North Star Directionally Correct. Three year level, we get a bit more tactical, we're making Strategic level decisions, but still a little bit more in the real world. Then we've got the annual yearly goal broken up by quarter. We have our big rocks. Those have a clear owner. We're checking in on them weekly with the leadership team meeting. And we've also got the state of the business every quarter for the entire company. We've got the pulse checks. So hopefully the heads of practice are conveying the messages down, but we got the pulse checks, um, going around. And then we have mechanisms to say, Hey. Was this goal well intentioned, but now things have changed? Let's have that discussion. We have clear decision makers on that. And then we have the, what are people motivated by? How are people feeling? And what are they thinking? And how can I have that conversation with people that keep us on track to our top priorities? How was that recap? Did I miss anything? It

Claire:

seems very comprehensive. When you say it like that, it feels complicated, but I have to say, like, living in it, It does become that heartbeat of the organization and if you get it set up, as long as you're pretty disciplined in maintaining it, then everybody starts to feel the momentum of it. It's like, oh, okay. Decisions are made. Progress is made. Everyone stays together. You know what to expect. And that's a great operating rhythm. Is that 1 that truly feels like the heartbeat of the organization.

Emily:

And I like that because it, I just, as I was saying it, there's so much alignment. It was like, like kind of like those Russian dolls where it's like this one and this one and then this one, and it's just all aligned or like, it's satisfying, like Tetris when like a piece fits perfectly. Yes. And that level goes away or like, yes, I did that one because all these things, like you said, when people get in a normal cadence, it just becomes like how we operate and how we talk together and how we make decisions. So it's this living, breathing thing. So I think it sounds like you at TXI have. You've created that and you're probably being humble, you've had a huge part in that it sounds like behind the scenes, but it's not complicated once you kind of get that stood up and ingrained. As we wind down here, are there any other pieces of advice or suggestions or learnings from past missteps that you would want to pass on to fellow Chiefs of Staff? Because there are always missteps and

Claire:

learnings. I think the big thing for me is to remember prioritization takes multiple facets at once. Really, it's an art. And the science, like, you've got the science part, the rigor, the framework for prioritization, the metrics that you're going to be tracking all of those cadences that you just described, but really it's pulling that together with the art of moving humans, right? How do you engage? How do you have empathy? How do you bring your understanding? And when you can bring those two pieces together, the art and the science, then you're really going to drive your business forward. But if you leave any of those parts behind, you're going to feel stumbles.

Emily:

Yeah. And I think a big part of prioritization too, is you mentioned this earlier, which is sometimes, yes, that's important. And yes, we'd love to work on that. And right now, this other thing just takes priority. Not saying that first thing isn't important. We'd love to do that. We just have to stay focused so we can Get the most bang for our buck. And that's part of it. Like at the end of the day, sometimes you have to make those calls.

Claire:

It's important. For me, it's important to remember saying no is not a negative thing. Saying no is a way to say yes. Like it's a weird spin, but it's true. You can't say yes to everything or you're actually saying yes to nothing. So by saying no, you're making an intentional choice. I will say yes to this one thing, and I have to say no to the other four or five.

Emily:

And it sounds like it might be, it's not a no, it's not right now. And then in the example you described where we could get this higher, so if we say yes to this, then we might be able to say yes to this higher over here that we need or want. So that's good too. If someone's listening and they're saying, okay, Claire, I would love to roll out the EOS process like you just described. That would be amazing. My team is not going to go for that right now. Is there, are there any smaller or, or intermediate steps where, okay, if you can't do the whole shebang, here are some things that I would suggest. If you can get these in place, these would still help you.

Claire:

Annual goals, even if you're not going to take it any higher up or break it down any further, if you can have annual goals that are clear. And measurable. Do you know, are you making progress toward these things? You can eventually build up and down from there But that feels like the right the right level to start at to keep everyone on the same page.

Emily:

Yes Amazing Claire. Thank you so much. This has been a really a really I love talking about this stuff And you have so many good ideas and insights and learnings So thank you so much for sharing those if someone wants to reach out to you and it's like hey I have a question and you seem like you have your stuff together on this. What's the best place to reach out? Also It sounds like TXI is a really good place to work. So if someone is interested in that, where's the best place to look into that?

Claire:

Yeah. Um, for me, LinkedIn is the best place to catch me. Um, feel free to connect. I love to chat about this kind of stuff anytime. And you can find out more about TXI at txidigital. com.

Emily:

Beautiful. Claire, thank you so much.

Claire:

Thanks, Emily. It was fun.