How to Downsize your EOS Leadership Group, without disappointing leavers?

I often get this question from clients who start EOS with a large leadership group of over 5-7 people. There are multiple reasons for starting with a big team.

• Some CEOs want to use EOS to engage middle management in the vision building process.
• Sometimes the more-the-merrier approach is to get a better perceived bang for their bucks invested in EOS implementation.
• Other times the leader finds it hard to exclude people, as it would necessitate him to differentiate between his people (i.e. make decisions).  The leader may see EOS as the tool to stimulate the emergence of leadership through these sessions. (It does work, but there can be pitfalls.)
• And finally the CEO may want a wider management group to participate in the vision building process, to get a broader base of input and buying from the executive level.

Find Your Core EOS Group

The recipe for picking the size of the starting team depends on the CEO. If he is comfortable uninviting people later, a bigger group is fine.  If that is not the case, start with a smaller group.

So how do you downsize the group, when the core team has emerged and it is time for focused execution and issue processing with your C-level leadership group?

What is un-ideal is to just terminate membership in the EOS process of people that…