"Sixty-one percent of corporate strategists say poor strategy execution is the primary reason that new growth initiatives fail,” says Marc Kelly, VP at Gartner. “It’s more of a problem than the strategy itself or the funding of that strategy, and it stems from a range of issues."
The 5 Pillars of Successful Strategy Execution. Gartner. July 17, 2023
You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue - one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality. Robust dialogue makes an organization effective in gathering information, understanding the information, and reshaping it to produce decisions. It fosters creativity - most innovations and inventions are incubated through robust dialogue. Ultimately, it creates more competitive advantage and shareholder value.
Robust dialogue starts when people go in with open minds. They're not trapped by preconceptions or armed with a private agenda. They want to hear new information and choose the best alternatives, so they listen to all sides of the debate and make their own contributions.
When people speak candidly, they express their real opinions, not those that will please the power players or maintain harmony. Indeed, harmony - sought by many leaders who wish to offend no one - can be the enemy of truth. It can squelch critical thinking and drive decision making underground. When harmony prevails, here's how things often get settled: after the key players leave the session, they quietly veto decisions they didn't like but didn't debate on the spot. A good motto to observe is "Truth over harmony." Candor helps wipe out the silent lies and pocket vetoes, and it prevents the stalled initiatives and rework that drain energy.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 102, 103
Know thyself - it's advice as old as the hills, and it's the core of authenticity. When you know yourself, you are comfortable with your strengths and not crippled by your shortcomings. You know your behavioral blind sides and emotional blockages, and you have a modus operandi for dealing with them - you draw on the people around you. Self-awareness gives you the capacity to learn from your mistakes as well as your successes. It enables you to keep growing.
Nowhere is self-awareness more important than in an execution culture, which taps every part of the brain and emotional makeup. Few leaders have the intellectual firepower to be good judges of people, good strategists, and good operating leaders, and at the same time talk to customers and do all the other things the job demands. But if you know where you're short, at least you can reinforce those areas and get some help for your business or unit. You put mechanisms in place to help you get it done. The person who doesn't even recognize where she is lacking never gets it done.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 81, 82
An organization can execute only if the leader's heart and soul are immersed in the company. Leading is more than thinking big, or schmoozing with investors and lawmakers, although those are part of the job. The leader has to be engaged personally and deeply in the business. Execution requires a comprehensive understanding of a business, its people, and its environment. The leader is the only person in a position to achieve that understanding. And only the leader can make execution happen, through his or her deep personal involvement in the substance and even the details of execution.
The leader must be in charge of getting things done by running the three core processes - picking other leaders, setting the strategic direction, and conducting operations. These actions are the substance of execution, and leaders cannot delegate them regardless of the size of the organization.
How good would a sports team be if the coach spent all of his time in his office making deals for new players, while delegating actual coaching to an assistant? A coach is effective because he's constantly observing players individually and collectively on the field and in the locker room. That's how he gets to know his players and their capabilities, and how they get firsthand the benefit of his experience, wisdom, and expert feedback.
It's no different for a business leader. Only a leader can ask the tough questions that everyone needs to answer, then manage the process of debating the information and making the right trade-offs. And only the leader who's intimately engaged in the business can know enough to have the comprehensive view and ask the tough incisive questions.
Only the leader can set the tone of the dialogue in the organization. Dialogue is the core of culture and the basic unit of work. How people talk to each other absolutely determines how well the organization will function. Is the dialogue stilted, politicized, fragmented, and butt-covering? Or is it candid and reality-based, raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions? If it's the former - as it is in all too many companies - reality will never come to the surface. If it is to be the latter, the leader has to be on the playing field with his management team, practicing it consistently and forcefully.
Specifically, the leader has to run the three core processes and has to run them with intensity and rigor.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 24, 25
Businesses that execute... prosecute with rigor, intensity, and depth. Which people will do the job, and how will they be judged and held accountable? What human, technical, production, and financial resources are needed to execute the strategy? Will the organization have the ones it needs two years out, when the strategy goes to the next level? Does the strategy deliver the earnings required for success? Can it be broken down into doable initiatives? People engaged in the processes argue these questions, search out reality, and reach specific and practical conclusions. Everybody agrees about their responsibilities for getting things done, and everybody commits to those responsibilities.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 23
Most often today the difference between a company and its competitor is the ability to execute. If your competitors are executing better than you are, they're beating you in the here and now, and the financial markets won't wait to see if your elaborate strategy plays out. So leaders who can't execute don't get free runs anymore. Execution is the great unaddressed issue in the business world today. Its absence is the single biggest obstacle to success and the cause of most of the disappointments that are mistakenly attributed to other causes...
Here is a fundamental problem: people think of execution as the tactical side of business, something leaders delegate while they focus on the perceived "bigger" issues. this idea is completely wrong. Execution is not just tactics - it is a discipline and a system. It has to be built into a company's strategy, its goals, and its culture. And the leader of the organization must be deeply engaged in it. He cannot delegate its substance. Many business leaders spend vast amounts of time learning and promulgating the latest management techniques. But their failure to understand and practice execution negates the value of almost all they learn and preach. Such leaders are building houses without foundations.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 5,6
Many people regard execution as detail work that's beneath the dignity of a business leader. That's wrong. To the contrary, it's a leader's most important job.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 1
We apply change management for one primary reason: to ensure that the desired results from the change are achieved.
The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.7
Corporate transformations still have a miserable success rate, even though scholars and consultants have significantly improved our understanding of how they work. Studies consistently report that about three-quarters of change efforts flop—either they fail to deliver the anticipated benefits or they are abandoned entirely.
Because flawed implementation is most often blamed for such failures, organizations have focused on improving execution. They have embraced the idea that transformation is a process with key stages that must be carefully managed and levers that must be pulled—indeed, expressions such as “burning platform,” “guiding coalition,” and “quick wins” are now common in the change management lexicon. But poor execution is only part of the problem; our analysis suggests that misdiagnosis is equally to blame. Often organizations pursue the wrong changes—especially in complex and fast-moving environments, where decisions about what to transform in order to remain competitive can be hasty or misguided.
Before worrying about how to change, executive teams need to figure out what to change—in particular, what to change first...
So how can leaders decide which changes to prioritize at the moment? By fully understanding three things: the catalyst for transformation, the organization’s underlying quest, and the leadership capabilities needed to see it through. Our analysis of stalled transformations suggests that failing to examine and align these factors drastically reduces the odds of producing lasting change.
Bharat N. Anand and Jean-Louis Barsoux
"What Everyone Gets Wrong About Change Management," Harvard Business Review. November-December 2017.
Desire represents the willingness to support and engage in a change. Desire is ultimately about personal choice, influenced by the nature of the change, by an individual's personal situation, as well as intrinsic motivators that are unique to each person.
Knowledge represents the information, training and education necessary to know how to change. Knowledge includes information about behaviors, processes, tools, systems, skills, job roles and techniques that are needed to implement a change.
Ability represents the realization or execution of the change. Ability is turning knowledge into action. Ability is achieved when a person or group has demonstrated capability to implement the change at the required performance levels.
Reinforcement represents those internal and external factors that sustain a change. External reinforcements could include recognition, rewards and celebrations that are tied to the realization of the change. Internal reinforcements could be a person's internal satisfaction with his or her achievement or other benefits derived from the change on a personal level.
ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community. 2006. Prosci Research. p.2,3
1. Initiative progress. Track progress not just in terms of time (milestones) and budget (money spent versus planned), but also against key operational performance indicators (e.g., cycle time, waste, wait times, quality).
2. Health impact. Are management practices and their underlying mindsets and behaviors shifting to support the improvements in performance that you want to see? Targeted analytics, surveys, focus groups, and observation can give you a good read....
3. Performance impact. Measure key business outcomes such as revenue, cost, and risk to confirm that improvements are happening where you expect and not causing unforeseen consequences elsewhere in the organization.
4. Value creation. Keep a constant eye on the ultimate outcome that matters. In large-scale company-wide change programs, this measure is shareholder value creation…. It is vital to have a clear-eyed view of the ultimate outcome that maters most amidst all of the other data.
Health is how effectively an organization works together in pursuit of a common goal. It is evaluated in levels of accountability, motivation, innovation, coordination, external orientation, and so on. A more memorable way to think about health-related actions is that they are those that improve how an organization internally aligns itself, executes with excellence, and renews itself to sustainably achieve performance aspirations in its ever-changing external environment.
Make no mistake, leaders have a choice when it comes to where they put their time and energy in making change happen. The big idea in delivering successful change at scale is that leaders should put equal emphasis on performance and health-related efforts....
Short-term gains can be made without tending to health, but they are unlikely to last.
Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger
Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger
LinkedIn manages its teams using a task-tracking system called ‘Objectives and Key Results,’ abbreviated as “OKRs.” First developed by Andy Grove at Intel, the strategy was popularized by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. Today, this shorthand is all over Silicon Valley. But it’s easy to dismiss a corporate-sounding acronym as just another leadership trick for distilling people’s work. Nothing about OKRs sounds inspiring. It’s how LinkedIn used them that helped employees connect more to the company’s collective mission.
“Vision is the dream,” says Weiner. “A company’s true north. It’s what inspires everyone day in and day out. It’s what you constantly need to be aspiring to.” He defines LinkedIn’s vision as “Creating economic opportunity for every professional," where 'professional' refers to every single one of the over 3.3 billion people in the global workforce.
Finishing is what you have to do, he thought. If you don’t finish, nothing is worth a damn.