by
Larcen Principal and Senior Consultant Linda Gaddie
As
we all know, creating a vision and overall strategy for your
business is key to its success. But once you have done this
strategic thinking, how do you make sure your vision is executed?
What are the competencies – both soft and hard – that
contribute to successful execution?
Research has shown that there are five keys to executing well:
1.
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Create
focus. Research consistently shows that
most organizations can do no more than three to five
major initiatives successfully in a year. The primary
roadblock to success is the lack of focus created
when there are too many initiatives. Companies that
are good at execution know that you can not keep
attention, energy and resources focused on more than
that without getting diffuse. Be simple and clear
about what you are going to do. How can you know
if your focus is too broad? Projects that began with
great energy, attention, and hype will begin to die
a slow and painful death: schedules will slip, people
will complain about conflicting priorities and inadequate
resources, and balls will get dropped. When this
happens, management loses credibility because they
have created a perception that they were not realistic
and/or weren’t very skilled at assessing the
company’s capacity.
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2. |
Communicate
the specifics. Help people understand the
details – the “who, what, when, where,
why and how” of getting it done. Make sure people
know what behaviors are expected of them and give them
guidelines for the choices they’ll have to make.
Sometimes businesses create a vision or operating plan
at a high level and fail to think through the nuances
of what it will really require in terms of human resources,
cross-functional work and funding. When that happens
the initiative flounders, not due to bad strategy,
but because the organization didn’t dig deep
enough on a detail level to discover what resources
were going to be needed to implement the plan. |
3.
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Commit
resources. Once you are clear on your focus
and understand the details because you’ve gone
through a rigorous planning stage, you need to make
commitments of people, time and money. In order to
do this, you may need to give up some of the projects
you are currently doing, rather than assuming the
organization is going be able to take on new priorities
and function well at 150 percent. A simple procedure
of assigning “person hours required” to
a list of project activities can help identify the
resource issues. Often leaders also assume that no
additional projects or activities will need to be
added in the course of the year. This ensures that
resources will be inadequate.
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4.
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Create
accountability. Accountability is not just
about a single person or group of individuals who
are responsible. It means creating a culture where
there is an expectation that projects are delivered
on time and on budget. If you have done the previous
steps – all the planning has been done well,
people have the resources they need and they understand
what they are supposed to do – then you can
hold people accountable. If you haven’t taken
those steps at all levels, holding people accountable
will be difficult because you have asked them to
do the impossible. You will know instinctively that
it is not reasonable to deal out punishment.
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5.
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Leverage
people. This final step means engaging people
in active problem solving, learning from them, and
getting into the trenches so that you understand
the challenges they face. Make sure you have the
skills as a leader that are necessary to assess what
people’s capabilities are, and be willing to
work with them to leverage those capabilities.
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Execution
is a set of disciplined processes that an organization uses
to accomplish its strategic goals. The key to execution is
that you cannot do one piece of it without doing them all.
When companies fail, it’s often because they have implemented
only parts of the puzzle. Good strategy and its execution
forces choices: good strategic thinking is as much about
what a company chooses not to do as it is about
what it does.
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