The difference between success and failure is often not in knowing what to do, but in doing it.
Execution is everything.
Whatever strategy companies adopt requires execution.
Execution will require behaviour change – doing things differently.
This behaviour must be achieved within the existing operating environment and “whirlwind” of business as usual activity.
Successful execution requires a disciplined approach consistently implemented. There are four key disciplines to successful execution:
Focus on the wildly important: Basically the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. You must say no to good ideas; there will always be more good (and sometimes great) ideas than a company has the capacity to implement.
This discipline starts by selecting one (or at the most two) extremely important goals, instead of trying to significantly improve everything at once.
If you are currently trying to execute five, ten, or even twenty important goals, the truth is that your team cannot focus. However, when you narrow the focus of your team to one or two wildly important goals, the team can easily distinguish between what is truly top priority and what is within the whirlwind of business as usual activity.
Two Measures
They move from a loosely defined and difficult to communicate collection of objectives to a small, focused set of achievable targets.
Whatever strategy you are pursuing, your progress and your success will be based on two kinds of measures: Lag and Lead.
Lag measures are the tracking measurements of the wildly important goal.
Revenue, profit, market share and client satisfaction are all lag measures, meaning that when you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past. By the time you see the lag measures you cannot fix it. It is history.
Lead measures are quite different in that they are the measures of the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal. They measure the new behaviours that will drive success on the lag measures.
A good lead measure has two characteristics: It is predictive of achieving the goal and can be influenced by the team members. For example, consider the simple goal of losing weight. While the lag measure is kilograms lost, two lead measures might be a specific limit on calories consumed per day and a specific number of hours of exercise per week.
The Scorecard
People play differently when they are keeping score.
This discipline is one of engagement.
The principle is that the highest level of performance comes from people who are emotionally engaged and the highest level of engagement comes from knowing the score; that is, if people know whether they are winning or losing.
Accountability cadence
This is where execution really happens, based on the principle of accountability: that unless we consistently hold each other accountable, the goal naturally disintegrates in the whirlwind.
A cadence of accountability is a programme of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.
Each week, one by one, team members answer a simple question: “What are the one or two most important things I can do in the next week (outside of the whirlwind) that will have the biggest impact on the scoreboard?”
Then members report on whether they met the previous week’s commitments, how well they are moving the lead and lag measures on the scoreboard, and their commitments for the coming week, all in only a few minutes.
Because each team commits o a new set of objectives each week, this discipline creates a weekly execution plan that adapts to challenges and opportunities that can never be foreseen in an annual strategic plan.
Adrian Dixon is an experienced consultant and strategy specialist. He is a member of the panel of judges for the Indian Newslink Indian Business Awards 2012.
Email: ajdixon@xtra.co.nz
