The Part of Your EOS® Annual Planning Session That's Not on the Agenda

You might already be familiar with the format of an EOS® Annual Planning Session.

On Day One, you review the year, focus on team health, and identify so many issues in Ninety you think you might wear out the pixels on your screen. On Day Two, it's time to build the plan. That means setting the 1-Year Plan and Rocks, and leaving with a V/TO® everyone believes in. Massively complicated stuff, made simple. That's the whole point of the two days.

What I want to talk about isn't what happens on Day One or Day Two. It's what happens around them.

I've watched this exact scenario play out more times than I can count. Not just with one client. It's a wildly common pattern that usually goes something like this: A leadership team includes family members and non-family members. The family already has a lot of built-in together time between softball games, vacations, and holidays. All year long, the family is out there building trust with each other without even trying.

The non-family members on the leadership team don't get any of that. They don't get invited to the swim meet or the family reunion. Their only shot at building that same kind of trust with the rest of the leadership team is the time they spend together as a team. And too often, business gets discussed, not the fun stuff.

So when Annual Planning rolls around, the family shows up to work having had a great, connected year together, and the leadership team, as a whole, hasn't had one single moment of pure fun.

The Three Circles of Family Business

In the late 1970s, John Davis and Renato Tagiuri of the Harvard Business School created the Three Circle Model of Family Business. This simple model shows the three different systems that need attention: the family, the business, and ownership. I like to think of those three circles as three tables. The kitchen table, the conference room table, and the boardroom table.

The kitchen table is where family stuff happens: holidays, reunions, the inside jokes that only exist because you grew up together. Business stuff lives at the conference room table: your Level 10s, your Quarterlies, your Annual. And the boardroom table is where ownership questions get worked through, from big financial decisions to why you own the business, how long you want to own it, and what you want from it.

Three tables, three sets of decisions, three separate rooms. Three different places that need health and trust to function well.

When the family goes to the swim meet or gathers for the holidays, that's kitchen table time. Good, necessary time. Keep having it.

But your leadership team doesn't live at the kitchen table. They live at the conference room table. And the conference room table needs its own fun, with everyone who sits there, family and non-family alike. You can't borrow trust from the kitchen table and spend it at the conference room table. It doesn't transfer. Each table has to earn its own.

Prioritizing Time Together

Your EOS Annual gives you a chance to work on building trust without adding another event to the calendar. You’ve already set aside and protected two full days for your whole leadership team to be together. My recommendation is to put some thought into the evening between those two days. Rather than leaving everyone to make their own plans, plan something for the whole team to do together.

Here are some of my favorite things I've seen leadership teams do:

• Cook together: Nothing builds a team faster than four people trying to figure out who's in charge of the risotto.

• Stay overnight somewhere: It doesn't have to be far, 45 minutes or an hour away is plenty. Just far enough that everyone's out of their normal routine and into the same one.

• Stay at a place a family business owns, or do an activity a family business runs: There's something right about family business leaders supporting another family business, even for a night.

• Do something one person on the team loves: Let someone pick an activity they genuinely enjoy and bring the rest of the team into it. Maybe one person loves fishing, another is into live music, or someone has a favorite local restaurant. It's about giving someone the chance to share a part of themselves the team doesn’t usually see at work.

• Use your Core Values to pick an activity: Ask: What's something we could do together that looks like who we say we are? If one of your Core Values is "We figure it out together," go do an escape room. If it's "We take care of our people," go get massages and let someone else take care of you for an hour. Let the values pick the plan instead of the other way around.

Why Should Team Building Happen More Than Once a Year?

Making time for team building activities is part of managing risk in your business. A leadership team that’s spent real time together handles hard conversations differently. There’s more trust, more benefit of the doubt, and less chance that healthy pushback turns into something personal.

So this year, don't just focus on business at your Annual. Plan fun too. That's a starting point, but I don't think you should let it be a once-a-year thing.

Think about it this way: If the family is hanging out every softball season, every holiday, every vacation, the leadership team needs more than one shot a year to catch up. This should be happening at least once a quarter, around your Quarterly, the same way you're already building it into your Annual. Same idea, four times the frequency.

Why Does Every Leadership Team Need Time Together?

This isn’t only an issue for family businesses. Every leadership team benefits from spending time together when there’s no agenda to work through and no problem to solve. That time helps people get to know each other beyond their Seats, which can make it easier to build trust, communicate more openly, and work through harder issues together.

The ripple effect of a healthy leadership team depends on more than the plan you build on Day Two of your Annual. It also depends on the relationships around the conference room table and how often you make time to strengthen them.

Kitchen table fun is for family. Conference room table fun is for the whole leadership team. If you want a leadership team that trusts each other in the room where the hard conversations happen, build a leadership team that can have fun together too.

Have more questions about this or other family business topics? Join me for the Family Business Office Hour at www.sarabstern.com.