Culture Focused Practice

Hey friends, Dr. Tara, Vossenkemper here, and you're listening to the Culture Focused Practice podcast. Thank you for joining me on this epic journey.

Okay, so you know what it is. It's an owner's room special, one of my favorite types of episodes. It's unscripted, it's exploratory. It's. S any direction, your guess is as good as mine.

We cover five questions today. There's a bonus question, so we're gonna do six. And also a real life scenario, sometimes two, which is what we're gonna do today day.

Today's owner's room is very close to my heart right now. Think about what happens when the system that you built with the intention of creating freedom for yourself starts to feel like a trap.

We build systems to serve us. Ideally, you know, that's where we're building systems, and EOS in particular is supposed to give us freedom, but what happens is that the structure starts to feel heavier than the chaos it replaced. That's this episode.

So it's about that moment when you realize that the machine that you built, the systems that you built, the processes, everything you put in place it actually now is your burden to bear. It's your cross to bear. It's your accidental cage that you built around yourself, and I'm here for it. I need this episode. I was reading questions right before I chose them and started, and it dawned on me just how great of timing it is to be doing this.

Of course, before we go further, make sure that you subscribe. If you are wanting more of these honest behind the scenes looks into leadership, then subscribe and then you can follow on any of the new episodes that drop.

Okay, so let's get to it.

Question number one, do I still feel free inside my own business? Hmm. Do I still feel free inside my own business? Yes. No. It's both. It's and both. It's yes and no. And it's also like my perception of free has changed across time. So I would say I worked way more hours and I was just constantly on towards the inception or the beginnings of the business, and also probably a few years in, and then kind of had a reality check by my husband where he was like, this is not fucking doing it for me.

And so I switched things up and then I stumbled into EOS, and that helped me clean things up even more. And so I think that now I feel much more free to lean into my own strengths within the business. However, I don't feel absolved of the weight of the business. I don't feel absolved of the liability. I don't feel like I have nothing to do with it.

I feel like my role as visionary is serving me in the best way, in that it allows me freedom to be creative and focus on the things that are not only really important to me, but also I think very important for the future of the business. And that still is a weighted role. Like that still is a cross to carry, so to speak, my burden to bear.

It's a burden that I willingly choose to bear, and I think I feel much more free and autonomous with my life now than if I was working for somebody else or again, doing this all over again, like at the beginning of the business, but I, I don't feel entirely free to just do whatever I want whenever I want.

I have a lot of autonomy, I have a lot of freedom, and I also have rhythmed to responsibilities. I am required to do certain things at key moments, not only on a biweekly or monthly or quarterly basis, but also I would say with regard to the vision of the practice and the direction that we're going.

So yes and no. Yes, I do feel free inside my own business and no, I don't feel free inside my own business. And I will say one more thing, my answer to this saying, no, I don't feel free inside my own business. It feels much less weighty than it used to,

so I definitely don't feel trapped or like I'm scrambling to find some time for myself. However, I also know that shit changes. And because I don't feel that way today or right now, doesn't mean I won't feel that way in a month or two or 20, you know? And at that point I'll need to reassess something's not working, what I need to figure out what is going on.

So, yeah, I think that's done. Let's do question two.

Okay, so question two, how do I know when I'm following the system too tightly or EOS too tightly?

I think that I have a couple answers here. I think first is that I. If I believe or I know that organizations or systems trend towards disorganization, then my thought is not that. I'm following the system too tightly. It's how do I ensure that we are staying organized in the way that we need to. And so I'm looking for where things are falling apart.

And also EOS by nature of how it's like set up and the structure, it allows for so much freedom within, that it hasn't ever felt rigid or like, you know, I'm being held back or something.

But my other thought is I think I would suspect that I was following a system too tightly if we were attempting to do EOS or use it as a framework to a T and nothing good was happening. Like we weren't willing to make any modifications to the system or the structure to make it work for us.

I'm pretty true to EOS. I think. So anyway. We try to be pretty true to EOS, so our agendas for our meetings, the cadence that we hold, big meetings like our quarterlies, the way that we document processes, the way that we look and talk about people issues, all of it, you know. Oh gosh, I love the issue solving track.

So we're pretty like true to EOS, but that doesn't mean we haven't done things that are slightly modified from what maybe Gino Wickman might say in order to make it work better for us.

So we were unwilling to do that, make any modification, that to me would be a sign that we are following EOS too tightly. We're being too rigid with something, especially if we weren't seeing positive outcomes from it.

And I feel a little bit nervous about saying that because I I don't want it to be interpreted, like take every single aspect of EOS and just make it work for you. Do whatever you want. No, I think you should learn it well and be utilizing it as purely as possible, and then when you have the data to support that something needs to be changed, then you would change that thing.

It's not like you're approaching something and you're doing it different before you've even done it the EOS way in the first place. So please don't do that. Just just try it at first and then make modifications once you have the data to support the modifications that you wanna make. Yeah, I think that's Question two answered.

Question three, where have I lost spontaneity or creativity in the name of process? Man, ask me this three months ago, and I am telling you what my answer would be super fucking different then than it is right now.

My spontaneity and creativity are lost when I have too much on my plate. So when my integrator was out on leave, bless her heart, and she's back now, thank God, but when she was out there were so many things that I was doing, there was no space and time to be in the visionary role.

And for me, the visionary role is creative. It's spontaneous, it's conceptual, it's grappling with these future focused whatever ideas or concepts or probably going to be problems down the line. So what can we do right now? I love that space. I love that space so fucking much.

So when I don't get to do that, it, it's, it's restrictive. I actually get really fucking pissy. I get really irritable when I don't have space and time to be able to like lean into where I naturally am wanting to go. I think probably most of us do, if we're not able to express ourselves in a way that feels accurate.

So three months ago, maybe even two years ago, I think that spontaneity and creativity were not lost in the name of process necessarily, but I think lost in the name of figuring out accurate roles and responsibilities for roles. And figuring out our accountability chart, you know, where things live and how they live between us and where I end and somebody else begins.

But once that got cleaned up, it's, it's easier to feel spontaneous. It's easier to feel like I have agency or autonomy to be creative.

Another thought I have here is that.

I and my leadership team have come to realize that's a lie, I should say. I have come to accept rather than realize, and I think my team has known this about me, and it's just been me sort of dragging my feet accepting that it's true and that I should stop doing something that doesn't work for me and then also the whole team.

I'm not good at maintenance of things. It's taken me a long time to really believe that, to the extent that I don't feel guilty about not doing it. And part of why I don't feel guilty is because when I try to maintain something, I inevitably fuck it up for somebody else. And so rather than even try, I just remove myself from whatever the process is so that way I don't get in the way of somebody else later on.

So that has helped to, you know, push back any guilt that I might feel about not being involved.

My point is, having accepted that I'm not good at maintenance helps me to not be involved in any consistent ongoing process. I sort of like remove myself. And in doing so, it's also a more role alignment with how we define visionary and what responsibilities I hold. And then b kind of gets at this piece where I have found spontaneity and creativity, where I have space to be able to play, you know, do whatever it is that I want to do. Again, in the spirit of helping out the practice, thinking about the team, focusing on culture, et cetera.

So I think nowhere then is ultimately my answer. I do not feel like I've lost spontaneity or creativity in the name of process. If I was in a position where I had to maintain processes for the entire team, or if I had to be involved in a lot of consistent process oriented things, I absolutely would feel like I was drained and had very little space for those things.

That would suck.

Okay. Moving on.

Question four. Where do I feel tension between being organized and being authentic? Oh gosh. I don't know about where maybe when, and the answer is all the time. Where do I feel tension between being organized and being authentic? That's just a constant source of tension for me.

It is a lot of mental effort for me to organize big things.

Scratch that. It's a lot of mental effort for me to organize big things in such a way that I have to share them with others. Organizing big things, grappling with them, thinking about them sort of comes natural to me. It's fun.

But if somebody said to me, okay, but also we need to make sure that that's relayed to the team. Oh gosh. Then my body is, you know, feels like it's filled with drying cement. That's where it becomes really hard.

And I do feel like that's part of my role is grappling with something and trying to bring it to life for the entire team. So it feels genuine and like an outgrowth of how I show up authentically. Like so it feels authentic to do this thing.

But then I have to, you know, organize it so that I can hand it to the right people or say, this is what I want it to look like. Here are the outcomes that I want, or pass it over entirely to extricate myself. That's a lot of where that tension comes in.

I feel like I have a very recent example of this. I have been grappling with marketing related things for years , literally years, like not just the conceptual approach to marketing, but also the different avenues for why you might do marketing, the ways in which you engage, the overlap between all of your content and what you're producing and why, the juxtaposition with all of that, and Google rankings.

So my point is. It dawned on me in the past few months in particular, that marketing is something that I need my integrator to oversee. Not generating copy, not posting on social media like she is not the one executing marketing. I need my integrator to be the one who is the central point for all of the marketing efforts.

So she is the one that is overseeing community-based marketing efforts, SEO based efforts, event planning, new service launches, ensuring that newsletters and social media stuff is getting posted. That's my integrator.

And when I realized that there's all of these pieces and they all need a central hub. Then I also realized this is me not being good at the maintenance piece. That the reason it wasn't going well is because we didn't have a central person responsible.

So I'm saying this to say, when this dawned on me, then I also realized, fuck, I gotta clean this up and pass it over. Like I cannot be the one doing this. It doesn't make any sense. It makes more sense that it be my integrator.

So then it took me a full day of organizing, creating some guidelines, creating tracking sheets, clarifying roles, relaying who does what, syncing everything up, creating some videos for my integrator to watch, to get an overview of sort of the concepts and what's happening and how it all moves and works together.

And it was a full day endeavor. I, I mean, sincerely, I thought it'd take me a couple of hours. No, it took me a full fucking workday. None of that felt authentic, like no part of me wanted to spend all day doing this thing, and it had to be done. It's all in my mind. It has to be relayed on paper. It has to be relayed and housed in such a way that it's clear to the person who's gonna step in to oversee it.

It feels really unfair to me to ask somebody to do something when it's not clean enough for them to step in and actually do. And it sucked to do. It was awful. Like no part of me wanted to do it.

So I think that that's an example of the tension between being organized and then being authentic. And when all of this was done, the immensity of relief that I felt in having it not only clean and clear and organized, but also knowing that there's a person who is ensuring that all of this is taking place was just huge. I mean, so, so fucking worth it. But still a lot of tension.

I don't think that being a visionary means you get to do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. I think that your responsibility as a visionary becomes more about ensuring that your concepts and ideas are brought to life and that you are forward thinking and that you are planning and ensuring that the people that you are LMA with, like my integrator for example, is well equipped to do what I need her to do for the health and longevity of the practice.

It would be great if I could just sit around and do whatever the fuck I wanted, but I can't, and I still feel like I do have freedom and agency and autonomy. It definitely is, and both including tension between being organized and authentic.

Okay. Let's keep going.

Question five, how do I remind myself that EOS is a framework, not a religion?

Man, maybe this is a cop out question, so I question everything. I love EOS because when I question it, if there's an answer that makes sense and typically there's an answer that is big enough conceptually to capture what it is that I'm after.

I think that if you approach it like it has all the answers, you're gonna be disappointed. It doesn't have all the answers. It's a way of operating your business, but the answers aren't built into EOS. The answers are in your practice, within your team, within how you interact with everybody.

What EOS does is it gives you a framework for unearthing those answers, for excavating them, for digging them out. But it doesn't give you an answer. It provides you with a framework.

So I think if you're looking to EOS for an answer. Y you'll be disappointed. EOS doesn't have the answers. You have the answers. Your team has the answers. EOS is just a way of operating that cleans everything up so that you can finally see them clearly.

Let's do it. Final question.

What kind of freedom am I actually chasing? Oh, this is an interesting question. What kind of freedom am I actually chasing?

I think I'm constantly seeking the balance between freedom and structure. And I think also I habituate quickly and I get really bored by consistency, and so there's not an arrival for me. There's not a specific thing that I'm necessarily after.

It's like the process of striving for that balance, the process of seeking to attain freedom or peace of mind or seeking to grow, or seeking to evolve as a person, that's what feels meaningful. That's what feels rewarding. It's the process of doing this thing.

When I arrive at a destination, I mean it's, you know, it's okay. I like being in process. I like the grappling process, it makes me feel alive, and so I don't know what kind of freedom I'm actually chasing. I'm trying to find that balance between freedom and structure.

Yeah. So.

All right, let's do this. Let's do two scenarios.

So scenario one, you are deep into EOS. You've got rocks and scorecards and accountability charts, and everything looks clean on paper, which is great, but you realize you haven't had a genuine conversation with your leadership team in weeks. Every meeting is tactical. Everything is about process. And you are starting to feel like a factory foreman or fore woman or foreperson and not a leader.

This is interesting to me. I don't know if it's because. Of the nature of my leadership team, like how we engage with each other. We absolutely stick to our agenda, especially our L10 meeting agenda. You know, and in those first few minutes they, and in those first few minutes, we always do a segue, which is your personal and your professional best in the last week.

And that's nice. Just a very small way of staying in tune with, you know, what's going on, what's been happening in the past week, how have you been, et cetera.

And then after that, even as we go through the agenda. We still bullshit with each other. So I think that just because you hold true to an agenda and you're staying tactical and you're staying process oriented, doesn't mean you can't be human.

If you're doing something like scorecard or you're reviewing your to-do list or you're doing client team headlines, you can joke, you can make little quips on the side. You can be human with the people around you.

And I think you can do all of that and still run a tight meeting, you can still do something that's very focused and intentional. I think the other piece just that I'm thinking about right now, like it's so rare that something like this would happen because I just, I mean, I, I feel like I really like to stay focused in a meeting, on the meeting content.

I don't like to waste my time or anybody else's really.

But we also still happen to find time just to share random things with each other and then get straight back into the meeting. You know, we're not spending 25 minutes having a therapy session or something, but we're still talking. We're still being human with each other. But I think if this was happening consistently and I felt like, damn, I really just wanna talk to my people.

I wanna know how they are. I wanna like see them. I mean, hell, I would probably just add time onto the meeting and say, this is just time for us to bullshit. I wanna know like, how are you, what's going on in your life? How are you feeling? How's everything going?

It could just be like the post L 10 coffee break or, you know what I mean? Like you could do something where you just spend a few minutes talking and catching up.

I don't necessarily know if I think there's anything wrong with staying really clean and focused, and if you're struggling with having genuine conversations and being intentional and like EOS focused at the same time, I mean, maybe this is just one of those like modifications we talked about. I would probably just build in bullshit time.

Like here's our half hour to catch up and do a bunch of fucking nothing, and we could systemize it or we could treat it like a structure that is now part of our L 10. It's just added on at the end. Something like that.

I think the other piece though is that if you do that and then you realize nobody's comfortable opening up, like nobody wants to share personal things, people aren't comfortable opening up, assuming that that is not the type of space that you want to be working in. To me that would indicate a different problem. That now indicates there's some sort of like people issue happening or global, like cultural issue. Or maybe it's just unique to your leadership team, but still some sort of issue that's happening that needs to be tended to or addressed.

So boom, that's scenario one. Short and sweet.

Okay, scenario two.

Your integrator is keeping things humming and your metrics are looking good, but there's always a but isn't there, you miss the energy you used to feel when brainstorming or problem solving as a team, you built this system for alignment, but now it feels like you're maintaining a machine instead of building something alive.

Yeah. This is another interesting scenario.

It sort of feels like if you're in L 10, if you're in some sort of L 10, you are problem solving as a team. When you have issues, you are using IDS to work through those issues and thus problem solving as a team.

If what you're missing is space to flesh out a not fully formed idea or concept, then honestly I would do some sort of like every other month, we just spend a two hour block of time talking about half baked ideas. What's the craziest idea you've had in the two months about the practice? What's something you would love to do, even if it might not ever come to fruition, and just start to capture these ideas.

I mean, you could write 'em down on your own, you know, or you could just capture them on your VTO. You might add like a future vision items or something like that.

And then whenever it comes time to meet, you've got like a list of things you could talk through. And so you're kind of scratching this itch where you are collectively brainstorming and I dunno about problem solving necessarily, although maybe, but it's not happening so frequently that it's getting in the way of sort of the normal rhythm of the practice. The normal rhythm of the business.

I also think that if you are saying that you built the system for alignment, but now it feels like you're maintaining a machine instead of building something alive, if you are the visionary and that's happening, my thought is that there's something off about the role. It seems like there's a little bit of role misalignment, and maybe that means we need to look at the accountability chart and see which responsibilities are falling where.

I would ask myself, are there specific things that I'm really not interested in doing or that really fucking drain my energy and just leach my systems entirely. That's gonna be something that I'm figuring out how do I get rid of this thing? I already, I have something in mind right now where I'm like, oh yeah, I'm, I need to get rid of this thing. It's payroll for the record. In process, but it still takes a hot minute to again, organize and figure out all the details and pass it over.

So my point is, if you are in that space, it might mean that you need to look at your responsibilities and figure out which responsibility are you holding onto that shouldn't live with the role that you're in. That's what I would do.

And, sorry, one more thing. And I would also maybe re-look at my vision. You know, I think that if you're doing the quarterlies, you know, the 90 day quarterly meetings from the EOS perspective or the the two day annual vision building. The idea is that we're coming together every 90 days so that we are reorienting to our big picture and our purpose for being here.

Why are we doing this and what are we doing and how do we get there? Not only literally how do we engage with each other in the process, but also kind of practically how do we move in that direction?

If you are not excited by the vision or the one year plan or the core values, something's off. Your entire leadership team should be excited and on board with these things. If you are the odd man out, that still means that it needs to be reassessed and that it needs to be addressed and maybe modified or edited or amended.

And I think in doing that, then we take some power back from feeling like we are just prey to the system that we built. We're just a cog in this wheel, and instead we're saying, no, I get to decide not only what this looks like, but also why it even exists in the first place.

And ideally if you do something like that, then you feel more alive. Not only do you feel like you're building something more alive, but also you internally would feel more alive with that process rather than just succumbing to the path of least resistance.

So I think that's all actually for today.

Look, I'm gonna give it to you straight. If you want to rebuild structure, if you want support in doing this, if you're really interested in EOS, join the EOS Mastermind first dibs list. It doesn't mean you're signing up for the Mastermind. It does mean that you get first dibs on when a mastermind opens up.

So whenever you are ready for it, then it's right there in your inbox.

You can access that easily. It's www.taravossenkemper.com/eos-mastermind.

That said, thank you as per usual for spending time with me, for being here with me. I hardcore value time, and so I really appreciate you spending some with me, and I'm hoping that this episode, much like all the others, it just pulls back the curtain on what leadership can be like.

Whatever it looks like on the outside from somebody else, whatever people's perception of what it looks like for you kind of doesn't fucking matter. Like it's human and it's fallible and it's messy and it's energizing, and it's just a whole host of different things that I think should be given more airtime than what they typically are.

So I hope you feel similar.

And on that note, I will see you next time. Thanks so much. Bye.