One of the world’s top business consultants is Ram Charan. He has personally coached leaders from several top 100 Fortune Companies for many years. He is probably best known for his work around Strategic Goal Execution. Ram once said, “To understand execution, you have to keep three key points in mind: (1) Execution is a discipline, and integral to strategy; (2) Execution is the major job of the business leader; (3) Execution must be a core element of an organization’s culture.”
We are going to explore this today because Execution is probably the biggest challenge a leader will ever face. In the beginning, it sounds easy. You’re the leader, you have a team, you have shared your strategy and now, all they have to do is execute, right? Wrong! It’s much more difficult than that.
First of all, only half of the people will claim they understood what you said. In reality, only 15% of people can articulate the strategy back to you and only half of those people probably know what to do. If 7-8% of your staff knows how to execute your plan, do you think you will make it?
Having the capability to execute is probably one of the most important aspects a leader can instill in their culture. While the statistics above are more of a picture of most businesses, there is still light at the end of the tunnel. Some organizations get it right year after year, and yours can too!
Please take a moment to review the photo below of The 5 Stages of Performance Improvement.
Let’s review each of these stages, so you can see HOW a culture is developed and strategy shifts towards execution.
1.) Drive to improve - Obviously, this is the first step. If you don’t change what you are currently doing in your business, you will not improve what you are doing now. So, the leaders must have this “drive” in order to begin making a shift in the culture.
2.) Leadership Emphasis - This is when the executive team picks something. It is best, to pick one or two top strategic imperatives. When you start adding goals to the list, The Law of Diminishing Return will kick your tail! It is also important that leaders don’t change this emphasis on a regular basis. If they do, their teams will never start to accept accountability because they know a new strategy will be developed soon. 3.) Team Accountability - Once the teams take ownership of the goal is when you begin to see a momentum building towards creating your culture. Division leaders now understand the goal; they know how they contribute to executing the strategy. Now they are communicating to their teams regularly and holding individuals accountable for measurable activity towards the goal.
4.) Individual Ownership - It’s one thing for a leader to tell you what to do, but when your individual contributors hold themselves accountable and start behaving in new proactive ways to take new steps towards implementation, this is when the wheels start moving.
5.) Habits - When individuals start putting new practices into place and do them consistently, you’ve got something! This is when the rubber is beginning to hit the road. Now leaders can predict outcomes based on a large group of individual behaviors or habits.
To sum it all up, our Regional Execution Practice Leader Scott Thele, recently said, "Your organization's culture is nothing more or less than the collection of habits of the majority of people most of the time." You can have a culture that executes or one that doesn’t. It’s all a result of your culture and people’s habits.
The goal is get your middle performers to behave like your top performers. Whether you have one location and you want most of the people performing at peak performance or whether you have multiple locations and you most of them performing like your top sites, the challenge is getting the large group to behave well, consistently. We call it Moving the Middle. How would your bottom line be affected if you could shift performance by 20% of your middle 60% of your organization? Do the math!
If you are a leader and are looking to execute a strategy that is going to take a substantial change in human behavior, then I highly encourage you to take a serious look at our proven process known as, The 4 Disciplines of Execution. We are helping clients across the globe achieve some pretty amazing results.
For more information or to join us for one of our upcoming sessions, Creating a Culture of Execution, please give me a call. We would like to be your strategic partner in 2012 and beyond!
Sincerely,
