We don't think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 89. See also It’s Easier To Act Your Way Into a New Way of Thinking Than To Think Your Way Into a New Way of Acting – Quote Investigator®
No one does the leader's job flawlessly, believe me. You've got to make mistakes and learn from them. Yankees manager Joe Torree got fired three times during his career. Now he's looked upon as the icon of the game. He learned some things along the way.
In his book, Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch freely admits he made many hiring mistakes in his early years. He made a lot of decisions from instinct. But when he was wrong, he'd say, "It's my fault." He'd ask himself why he was wrong, he'd listen to other people, he'd get more data, and he'd figure it out. And he just kept getting better and better. He also recognized that it's not useful to beat other people up when they make mistakes. To the contrary, that's the time to coach them, encourage them, and help them regain their self-confidence.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 83
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
Leaders who execute focus on a very few clear priorities that everyone can grasp. Why just a few? First, anybody who thinks through the logic of a business will see that focusing on three or four priorities will produce the best results from the resources at hand. Second, people in contemporary organizations need a small number of clear priorities to execute well. In an old-fashioned hierarchical company, this wasn't so much of a problem - people generally knew what to do, because the orders can down through the chain of command. But when decision making is decentralized or highly fragmented, as in a matrix organization, people at many levels have to make endless trade-offs. There's competition for resources, and ambiguity over decision rights and working relationships. Without carefully thought-out and clear priorities, people can get bogged down in warfare over who gets what and why.
A leader who says "I've got ten priorities" doesn't know what he's talking about - he doesn't know himself what the most important things are. You've got to have these few, clearly realistic goals and priorities, which will influence the overall performance of the company.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 69
The personal connection is especially critical when a leader starts something new. The business world is full of failed initiatives. Good, important ideas get launched with much fanfare. but six months or a year later they're dead in the water and abandoned as unworkable. Why? Down in the organization, the managers feel that the last thing they need is one more time-consuming project of uncertain merit and outcome, so they blow it off. "This too will pass," they say. "just like the last bright idea of the month." Result: the company wastes time, money and energy, and the leader loses credibility, usually without realizing that the failure is a personal indictment.
The leader's personal involvement, understanding, and commitment are necessary to overcome this passive (or in many cases active) resistance. She not only has to announce the initiative, but to define it clearly and define its importance to the organization. She can't do this unless she understands how it will work and what it really means in terms of benefit. Then she has to follow through to make sure everyone takes it seriously. Again, she can't do this if she can't understand the problems that come with implementation, talk about them with the people doing the implementing, and make clear - again and again - that she expects them to execute it.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 65
