PDF Summary:Traction, by Gino Wickman

Does your business feel stuck no matter how much effort and time you put into it? In Traction, Gino Wickman argues that many businesses hit this growth ceiling because they lack clear systems and structure. To break through this stagnation, you must turn your business into a self-sustaining organization. Wickman provides a system for doing so, helping you eliminate common frustrations so that your business can run seamlessly without your constant oversight and grow at a faster rate than you thought possible.

In this guide, we’ll explore the six steps of Wickman’s system for building a better-functioning business, discussing how to establish a clear vision, organize your team effectively, track essential metrics, solve problems systematically, document your processes, and execute your vision by setting quarterly priorities. We’ll also supplement Wickman’s advice with insights from other business experts and provide additional tips for growing your business.

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Step #2: Organize Your Team Effectively

After you’ve created a clear vision, the next step to creating a successful business is to build an effective team. Wickman argues that having people who don’t fit your company or having people in the wrong roles hurts your business. To organize your team effectively, hire people who share your guiding values and place them in roles that match their skills.

Assess the Cultural Fit of Your Employees

First, Wickman suggests you create a system to measure how well employees align with your company values. This clarifies personnel decisions and reduces subjectivity.

1. Make a spreadsheet with core values across the top
2. List employee names down the side.
3. Rate each person on each value: strong, moderate, or weak.
4. Set a minimum acceptable standard with your leadership team.

When someone falls short of this standard, give them an opportunity to improve. Wickman recommends a three-step process: First, clearly explain the issue and your expectations. Give them 30 days to improve. Second, if they don’t improve enough, clarify expectations again and give them another 30 days. Lastly, if they still don’t meet your standards, end their employment. Your other employees will appreciate this accountability.

Managing Two Types of Underperforming Employees

Not all underperforming employees are the same, and understanding why someone is struggling can help you decide whether to coach them or let them go. In Radical Candor, Kim Scott distinguishes between two types:

For employees with a history of low performance who show no signs of improvement, Scott recommends asking yourself whether you’ve been clear about expectations, whether their work is dragging down the team or taking your attention away from higher performers, and whether a neutral third party agrees with your assessment. If you answer yes to these questions, it’s likely time to part ways—holding onto someone who consistently underperforms ultimately hurts your entire team.

For employees who previously performed well but are now struggling, Scott suggests you identify potential reasons behind their decline: They might be in the wrong role for their skills, or may need better training or a lighter workload while adjusting to a new position. They could be dealing with personal problems that need time and space to resolve, or they might simply clash with your company culture. Understanding which of these issues is at play helps you decide whether to reassign them, support them through a rough patch, or acknowledge that they’d be happier elsewhere.

Create a Clear Organizational Structure

After you ensure employees’ cultural fit, Wickman suggests you define clear functions and roles. Most businesses have three main functions:

• Sales and marketing: attracting customers and closing deals
• Operations: creating and delivering what you sell
• Finance: handling accounting and money management

Wickman recommends appointing one leader for each of these functional areas. This creates clear lines of responsibility and prevents confusion about who handles what parts of the business.

(Shortform note: In Business Made Simple, Donald Miller recommends thinking of your business as an airplane to understand how different business functions interact and depend on each other. The plane’s body represents your overhead costs, the wings are your products and services, the engines are marketing and sales, and fuel is your cash flow. For the plane to fly, all parts must be in the right proportion—if the body is too heavy with overhead costs or the engines of marketing and sales aren’t powerful enough, the plane crashes. This mental model reinforces why having strong leaders in each functional area matters: Each part of your business airplane needs someone ensuring it stays balanced with the rest.)

Beyond these three functions, Wickman writes that every company needs two types of leaders:

• A managerial leader runs day-to-day business operations, oversees finances, and tracks goals. They excel at management, problem-solving, and holding people accountable.
• A visionary leader (often the founder) generates creative ideas, solves major problems, and builds important relationships. They stay connected to company culture and morale.

According to Wickman, these two leadership types complement and balance each other. Companies typically struggle without both types of leaders.

(Shortform note: In The Founder’s Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman also recommends splitting leadership roles, but he argues that you must balance clear role division with collaboration. When founding teams divide responsibilities, each person can focus deeply on their area of expertise. However, this can also create overly rigid silos where leaders only care about their own department. Therefore, your business will benefit more from specialization (like having dedicated visionary and manager leaders) if you ensure these roles work together cohesively rather than in isolation.)

Put People in the Right Positions

Once you have a clear structure, Wickman says to make sure people are in positions where they can excel. To determine if someone is right for a role, ask yourself three questions:

• Do they fully understand the role? This includes all the role’s responsibilities, the systems they’ll interact with, and how their job connects to the company’s mission.
• Do they genuinely want the role? They should be motivated and truly enjoy the work.
• Do they have the capability to do it well? They should have the necessary intellectual, physical, and emotional abilities, including experience, knowledge, and interpersonal skills.

When someone doesn’t satisfy all three criteria, you lack confidence in their performance, so you can’t give them full ownership of their responsibilities. This creates frustration on both sides: You feel burdened by the extra oversight that putting them in that position entails, and they feel untrusted and controlled.

Get Direct Input From Employees About Their Fit

While Wickman recommends that you ask yourself questions about whether someone fits a role, other experts suggest a more collaborative approach. In First, Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham says having regular career conversations gives employees the chance to reflect on their own talents and lets you work together to find roles that genuinely fit them.

During these discussions, ask employees to describe what success looks like in their current role, what they enjoy most about their work, what they struggle with, and what their ideal position would be. You should also share your perspective as a manager throughout the conversation to create a dialogue.

If you’re moving someone into a new role, consider doing a trial period. This removes a sense of “failure” if the role turns out to be a poor fit—employees can return to their previous position without feeling embarrassed.

Step #3: Track Key Metrics

According to Wickman, the third step to creating a successful business is to monitor weekly metrics. Many business owners rely on gut feelings instead of actual data. Additionally, while most companies look at monthly financial reports, by then it’s often too late to fix emerging problems. Therefore, Wickman recommends creating a weekly tracking system to assess your business health, spot problems and trends, and make corrections before issues escalate.

(Shortform note: In How to Measure Anything, Douglas Hubbard says even simple measurements can dramatically improve decision-making by reducing uncertainty. When you track weekly metrics, you’re essentially creating what Hubbard calls “confidence intervals”—probability ranges that tell you where the true value of something likely falls. For example, weekly metrics might show you there’s a 90% chance sales will fall between $40,000-$60,000 this month, giving you specific bounds to work with.)

To develop a weekly tracking system, first choose your key numbers: five to 15 metrics that best show how your business is performing each week. These might include sales revenue, new customer leads, website visitors, inventory turnover rate, and so on. Then, create a tracking spreadsheet with the metrics in the left column, followed by a target column for those metrics, and then columns for 13 weeks of data. Set your targets based on the goals in your annual plan.

(Shortform note: In The 4 Disciplines of Execution, Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey recommend you track both lag measures (results that tell you if you’ve achieved your goals) and lead measures—the actions that predict future results. The most effective lead measures have two qualities: They must be predictive (directly affecting your lag measures) and influenceable (something your team can control without depending on outside factors). By including both types of metrics in your weekly tracking spreadsheet, you create a more complete picture of not just your results, but the actions driving those results.)

Next, Wickman suggests you give every employee one number they’re responsible for achieving. Numbers are concrete and objective. They create clear accountability, increase productivity, and encourage teamwork. For example, assigning an employee to “schedule at least 10 client meetings per week” is specific and measurable, while telling them to “stay busy with clients” is vague and subjective.

Each week, review the spreadsheet with your leadership team to monitor how the business is performing and make any necessary adjustments to stay on track toward your goals.

(Shortform note: Some experts caution that number-based accountability systems can backfire. Research shows that only 21% of employees feel their performance metrics are within their control, which makes accountability feel arbitrary and demotivating. To make number-based accountability work, experts recommend focusing on solutions rather than blame—working with employees to identify meaningful steps for improvement rather than simply assigning a score. Provide consistent feedback, acknowledge your own role in their work, and treat mistakes as opportunities for growth rather than punishment.)

Step #4: Solve Problems Systematically

Beyond tracking numbers, Wickman says that successful businesses also need a consistent way to identify and solve problems. He explains that many leadership teams fall into the trap of discussing the same problems repeatedly without actually solving them. When issues remain unresolved, they drain your company’s energy and resources, getting in the way of your goals.

Maintain Problem Lists

To solve problems systematically, Wickman recommends documenting all issues in lists where they can be addressed. He suggests creating three types of problem lists:

A quarterly issues list: Use this list for problems that aren’t urgent and can wait three months to be addressed in quarterly leadership meetings. This might include creating employee development programs or discussing major equipment purchases.

A weekly issues list: Use this list for important problems that affect your entire company (not just one department) and need to be addressed at the next weekly leadership meeting. This might include company goals that are falling behind schedule, key performance metrics that are too low, or problems with important clients.

A departmental issues list: Use this list for urgent problems within a specific department that must be handled immediately. For example, a marketing team might track issues like fixing a broken website link or meeting a deadline for an advertising campaign.

How Problem Lists Prevent Workplace Dysfunction

According to Liz Wiseman in Impact Players, many workplaces suffer from small, nagging problems that everyone complains about but no one fixes. These issues often go unresolved because they seem annoying but not urgent enough to prioritize. However, ignoring these problems lets them quietly erode your team’s productivity and effectiveness over time. When you document issues on a list, you prevent them from lingering indefinitely and ensure they eventually get resolved.

Wiseman also offers specific guidance for how employees can take initiative and tackle problems that have been identified. She encourages them to step into informal leadership roles to address issues that no one else is handling. By maintaining organized problem lists, you create a system that makes it easier to identify which problems aren’t being addressed and opportunities for employees to step in to make a difference.

Resolve Problems Efficiently

Once you’ve sorted your problems into the right lists, you need a clear process to solve them efficiently. Wickman offers five steps:

1. Prioritize: Select the three most important problems from your list and address them in order of importance.

(Shortform note: If you’re not sure how to decide the order in which to solve your problems, consider Mike Michalowicz’s system in Fix This Next. He organizes business needs into five tiers (from lowest to highest): sales, profit, structure, influence, and self-perpetuation. To find your most critical problem, identify the lowest tier where you still have unfulfilled requirements, then determine which specific issue within that tier would most improve your company if solved.)

2. Identify the root cause: Dig deeper to find what’s really causing the problem. Many teams waste time by discussing symptoms rather than root causes.

(Shortform note: Sometimes the root cause isn’t obvious because you’re facing what Richard Rumelt (The Crux) calls a “broad issue”—a complex problem with no known solutions or reliable way to test new solutions. When you encounter problems like these, you’ll need to develop entirely new approaches to uncover what’s truly causing the problem.)

3. Gather input: Let everyone on the team contribute their perspective on the problem. When you’ve correctly identified the root cause, the right solution often becomes obvious to everyone.

4. Act on a solution: Choose the best solution and assign one specific person to carry it out.

5. Track completion: Add the task to your to-do list and check in regularly to make sure it gets done. Once it’s finished, you can cross the problem off your list.

(Shortform note: In Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres argues that people generate more creative ideas when they brainstorm alone before sharing with the group. Group brainstorming can cause people to get stuck or defer to others’ thinking, which limits creativity. Torres recommends you alternate between solo and group sessions until you have at least 15 potential solutions, then vote to narrow down to the top three options.)

Step #5: Systematize Your Business Processes

According to Wickman, your company has a few key processes that keep it running—together they constitute your unique approach to doing business. He recommends that you document these processes by writing down step-by-step instructions for each one. When you do this, employees can follow the documented steps instead of constantly asking you questions. This frees you to focus on building your business rather than managing daily details.

Additionally, when everyone follows the same processes, managers more easily identify and solve problems. Many problems stem from process breakdowns—you can trace the problem to the specific failed step and correct it. Standardized processes also position you for growth. When you have proven, documented methods, you can train new employees quickly and maintain quality as you expand. This makes it easier to scale your business by serving more customers and generating more revenue without sacrificing consistency.

(Shortform note: Though Wickman touts the value of standardization, in The End of Average, Todd Rose warns that too much standardization can stifle individuality. He explains that many modern businesses follow an outdated 19th-century factory model, where managers designed rigid, one-size-fits-all processes that the average worker could follow without thinking. While this might seem efficient, it hurts both employees and companies—employees feel unfulfilled, and businesses miss out on the creative ideas and unique strengths their employees could contribute. The key may be finding balance: Use standardized processes as a foundation for consistency, but give employees room to apply their individual strengths and ideas.)

Wickman suggests you start by identifying every major process in your business and listing their names on one page. Most businesses have processes for hiring and managing people, marketing their services, making sales, delivering their product or service, managing finances, and serving customers.

Next, have each person who runs each process document the steps involved. Wickman recommends keeping it simple: Focus on the critical 20% of the process that produces 80% of the results. For each process, list the main steps with brief instructions—aiming for fewer than 10 pages per process. This documentation helps you spot steps you can remove or improve.

(Shortform note: As Wickman observes, it’s important to limit the number of processes you focus on. In The Friction Project, Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao explain that organizations often suffer from “addition addiction”—leaders keep piling on new rules, meetings, and processes without removing anything. This creates friction that slows everyone down and frustrates employees. To combat this, they recommend surveying employees about what frustrates them and weighing whether tasks are truly valuable.)

Lastly, says Wickman, put all your documented processes into one employee manual and train every employee on the processes they need to use. Make it clear that these processes aren’t optional—everyone, including you and other leaders, must follow them consistently.

Document a Process for When There Isn’t a Process

Documented processes work well for routine tasks, but what happens when employees face unexpected situations that aren’t covered in your manual? In these situations, Mike Michalowicz (The Pumpkin Plan) suggests creating a framework for how employees should think instead of what they should do. When team members approach decisions the same way you do, they’ll naturally arrive at similar solutions—even in unpredictable circumstances.

Michalowicz recommends giving employees three questions in this order:

• Will this decision improve our best customers’ experiences?

• Will it support our unique way of delivering products or services?

• Will it benefit our profitability?

If an employee answers “no” at any stage, they need to rethink their approach and come up with a different plan. The ordering of these questions protects your company from short-term thinking. By requiring employees to prioritize customer experience and your unique approach before considering profits, you prevent decisions that might make money quickly but weaken what makes your business special. This framework gives your team the freedom to solve problems independently while ensuring their decisions align with what matters most to your company—just as documented processes do for more predictable tasks.

Step #6: Execute Your Vision

According to Wickman, the final step to creating a successful business is to turn your vision into real actions and results. To execute your vision, set 90-day priorities for everyone and establish a meeting structure. These tools keep everyone focused on the same goals and create accountability for results.

Clarify 90-Day Priorities for Everyone

Wickman suggests you meet with your senior leaders to review your vision and set quarterly priorities. Start by listing everything that must be accomplished in the next 90 days to move toward your vision.

Then, narrow this list to three to seven company priorities. For each priority, set a deadline and make sure it’s specific, measurable, and achievable. Assign one leadership team member to own each priority. This person creates a timeline, assigns tasks to team members, and makes sure the work gets done.

(Shortform note: In Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish recommends creating a fun theme for your 90-day priorities to make them more engaging. For example, if you’re working to boost customer satisfaction scores, you might create a space exploration theme called “Mission to the Stars” with posters showing your team as astronauts exploring new frontiers of service excellence. When the team hits their goal, reward them with a team outing to a planetarium or escape room with a space theme. This gives your team something to look forward to and a way to celebrate their wins together, making your quarterly priorities feel more like shared challenges worth conquering.)

After setting company priorities, have everyone set their own goals: Each leadership team member sets three to seven priorities for the quarter (including any company priority they own). Compile all company and leadership priorities onto one page and review this list weekly at leadership meetings. Then, each department and each employee follows the same process to set one to three priorities of their own.

(Shortform note: In Working Backwards, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr explain how Amazon takes Wickman’s prioritization even further with single-responsibility teams. Unlike traditional companies, where employees juggle multiple projects simultaneously, Amazon assigns each team one focus—like expanding into a new market or improving a specific service. This prevents people from having too many scattered priorities that go unfinished. So, when setting priorities, consider limiting the number to the lower end of Wickman’s range if you want to ensure they get successfully executed.)

Hold Regular Leadership Meetings

Next, to execute your vision, Wickman suggests you hold regular meetings to keep everyone accountable and make progress toward your goals. He suggests two types of meetings:

Quarterly meetings: At the start of each quarter, review the previous quarter’s results, such as the financials and the priorities you’ve achieved. Then, set new priorities for the next 90 days.

Weekly meetings: Once you’ve set your quarterly priorities, meet with your leadership team weekly to stay focused and address issues. Review your tracked numbers, priorities, and last week’s tasks. Also, use this time to solve the problems on your lists.

Tips for Holding Effective Meetings

In Death by Meeting, Patrick Lencioni explains that most meetings feel like a waste of time because they lack the drama and conflict that keep people engaged. He argues that meetings should be as compelling as movies—they need a hook in the first 10 minutes that explains what’s at stake for the company and its employees. For instance, you might explain that the company is under threat, or that it’s struggling to make a dent in a new market. Alternatively, if you don’t want to start on a negative note, explain how a good decision could make life better for employees, clients, or the world.

Lencioni recommends holding weekly and quarterly meetings as Wickman suggests, but he also mentions two additional types:

First, he recommends holding daily five-minute check-ins where everyone shares what they’re working on that day. When everyone knows what their colleagues are doing, there’s less confusion and redundant work throughout the day.

Second, he suggests monthly strategic meetings lasting two to four hours, where you debate major decisions with only two to three topics on the agenda. Unlike Wickman’s weekly and quarterly meetings that focus on tracking progress and setting priorities, these strategic sessions give you time to thoroughly explore big questions like whether to expand into a new market or change your target customer.