What I Got Wrong Sitting in Too Many Leadership Seats

My business was about 100 locations in when our EOS Implementer walked into a quarterly session, put an Accountability Chart on the wall, and finally asked the question we had avoided for six years: Who is the Visionary? Who is the Integrator?

As a growing franchise, we implemented the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS — a simple set of tools and disciplines for entrepreneurial companies, built around getting the right people in the right seats and running the business consistently. On that Accountability Chart, the Visionary and Integrator sit at the top: the Visionary is the big-picture leader who owns the long-term direction, major external relationships and the company’s culture, while the Integrator runs the business day-to-day, harmonizes the major functions and holds the leadership team accountable.

My partner and I built the company by doing what most founding partners do: everything. Now we had to pick lanes in front of our leadership team, and I felt my ego stand up in the chair before I did.

I landed in the Visionary box, My partner in the Integrator box. On that chart, the Visionary sits above the Integrator. Does that make my 50/50 partner my boss?

It does not. But it forced us to acknowledge that these were different jobs.

EOS gave us the language for a dynamic that exists in many growing companies. The Visionary owns the future, the big relationships and the ideas. The Integrator owns the plan, the people, the numbers and the trains running on time, per the EOS 

I have now sat in both seats, and it took a second company to understand what I got wrong in each one. Today, as an EOS Implementer — the outside coach who helps leadership teams use the system consistently and get more of the right things done — I watch the same tensions play out in other leadership teams.

Getting the Visionary seat wrong

I was good at parts of it: culture, big relationships and thinking about what was coming next. What I struggled with was letting go.

I loved building technology, so I kept it. I stayed inside our point of sale system, adding features, spending more than half my time in a department I had no business being in. The excuse was always the budget. We cannot afford to hire this out, and look what it would cost if I were not doing it.

Our chief marketing officer finally said it out loud in a quarterly session. Then she said it again in the next one.

“Craig, you need to get out of technology, and you need to be our Visionary.”

She was right, and I got defensive. Excuse after excuse.

We say “open and honest” in EOS. I did not do the open part well. I took it as an attack instead of asking the obvious question:

Tell me more.

Being good at something does not mean you should keep owning it as the company grows. Being good at it is often what makes it so hard to let go.

Getting the Integrator seat wrong

Years later, I took the Integrator seat at a global engineering services company, and I made the opposite mistake. The Visionary had a podcast. I saw something expensive, time-consuming and hard to connect to the results I was accountable for. I pushed to shut it down and eventually we did.

What I missed was that it mattered to him, and I never stopped to ask why. The same three words would have helped here too:

Tell me more.

There may have been a $5,000 version sitting right there. One camera in the office, handed to sales as a reason to invite prospects on.

I never explored it because my foot was already on the brake. That is the trap.

I describe the Visionary and Integrator relationship as a gas pedal and a brake. The more the gas gets pushed, the more you brake, until braking becomes your default stance and you stop noticing the moments you should be accelerating. Meanwhile, the Visionary floors it harder because he assumes you will slow him down anyway.

Two gas pedals and you go off the mountain. Two brakes and you lose the race. A good brake is what lets you take the corner fast.

The Integrator’s job is not to kill ideas. The better question is: what version of this can we actually execute? The Visionary owes a question, too: what constraint are you seeing that I am not?

In one seat, I treated feedback like resistance. In the other, resistance became my default.

Getting the relationship right in the next 30 days

Three things.

First, put a weekly Same Page Meeting on the calendar and keep it. In EOS, this is a dedicated one-on-one between the Visionary and Integrator — not another operating meeting — where you surface the issue that has been sitting between you for months, rather than hoping it resolves itself.

Second, learn how the other person receives hard feedback. The Kolbe A Index, DISC, CliftonStrengths, any of them will do. The score is not the point. The conversation it starts is.

My partner and I built our own shorthand for it. When he gave me feedback before I was ready to hear it, I would tell him I like sugar in my coffee. He would ease off, give me a pat on the back and then I could take it.

When I was talking in circles and would not land the plane, he would tell me he likes his coffee black, and I would get to the point. It was a running joke, and it was completely serious.

Third, build the relationship outside the business. Lunch every couple of weeks. A standing happy hour. A round of golf. Get the families together for a backyard barbecue and let the kids learn each other’s names.

That sounds soft next to a Scorecard. It is not. Trust deep enough to say the hard thing and still walk out as one voice, and know that this does not come from an agenda.

You do not have to walk out agreeing. You do have to walk out committed, with one voice, and neither of you gets to undermine it later.

Years ago, I worried about which box my name went in. The box was never the point. The person in the other seat was.

What I value now is having someone who sees what I cannot, tells me what I may not want to hear, and still knows we are building the same thing.

Go find yours and say the thing you have been avoiding.