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Lawrence G. Hrebiniak, author of “Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change”, notes in his book “Most of MBAs receive great training in planning but far less in execution. Even though they are good managers, over time they really have to learn through the school of hard knocks, through experience, which means you make lots of mistakes”.
You will never eliminate mistakes and life’s hard lessons can be the best teachers. You gain the maximum learning and development factor from these precious lessons when you increase the awareness of the critical success factors. By paying attention to what is critical, you focus the learning so when the mistakes happen, executives glean the important lessons. Here then are some of the key areas to pay attention to.
Communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more
A well thought out plan cannot be implemented if no one knows what it is. I was working with one client where the CEO and executive team developed a sound plan to move their company from mild year-to-year growth, to double-digit growth rates. They analyzed the marketplace and came up with a distinct advantage that could propel them ahead of the competition. The CEO assumed the plan would work its way done through the whole organization since all the executives supported the plan. What she failed to realize was that after the planning session, the team became very preoccupied with day-to-day urgencies. Six months later, little had been done to communicate the strategy throughout the organization.
Execution Implementation Planning
Closely related to communication is establishing an implementation plan with very specific, action focused initiatives. What many people fail to realize is that new strategic direction will often get lost in the business of getting the job done. No one has time to figure out how things need to change in order to ensure effective execution.
Working with the CEO and her team we defined the key strategic initiatives and an action plan with milestones and responsible individuals. By developing an execution implementation plan, we were able to take into account such things as: organization’s readiness for the change, natural resistance to change, and impact on current business. We built in a sequence of actions from communicating the plan to defining changes in various processes in a sequence that built on each other. For example, we had the CEO visit all the facilities talking first with the unit managers and then with the employee base at large. Once people understood the direction the reasons for them and the firm commitment from the top we began to approach some of the process changes. We next changed the marketing message and did this prior to expecting the sales force to role out the new sales strategy.
Attention, Attention, Attention
Developing the implementation plan is still not enough to ensure it will be properly executed. Making sure the plan is adhered to through proper follow up is equally as critical. In his article, Mankins states that “less than 15% of companies routinely track how they perform over how they thought they were going to perform”.
We all now how difficult it is to change an organization. Newton’s laws of inertia give us some insight. “A body in motion will stay in motion until operated by an outside force”. The same is true for organizational inertia. I cannot think of an executive who has not experienced the difficulty of maintaining a strategic focus when consumed with the challenges of daily execution. Months will slip by before the team realizes that they have slipped off track from their plan. It is simply organizational inertia operating. One of the advantages of bringing in an outside force to stay on top of the implementation is they will regularly pull the team back from the forest and review progress against the plan. The team knowing they will be regularly held accountable for the action items they agreed to, will more likely pay attention to the plan and execute more effectively.
Don’t forget the people
Jim Collins in “Good to Great” states how important it is to get the right people on the bus. We all know that when it comes to execution it is the people who do the executing. But is it just hiring the right people that’s the challenge? I suggest that very few managers ever go out of their way to hire the wrong people, or that they purposely put the right people in the wrong positions. And while we strongly believe in the importance of doing everything possible to bring in the right people this is never enough.
As a simple example, assume you hired the best VP of Marketing three years ago. Over the last three years, this person did a marvelous job of performing exactly what was needed. However, the market and now your strategy have changed over the three years. You are now faced with a new set of required skills and a previously great performer becomes the wrong person on the bus. It is unlikely that you will just toss this person out. Add up all the people in your organization whose skills were perfect when you hired them but who now are not as perfect and you can see why it is overly simplistic to assume that you can just hire your way to having the right people on the bus. A solid culture of developmental accountability must accompany successful execution of new strategies. When you tie accountability for performance to a well developed performance improvement process, you are simultaneously setting the expectations that people are to focus on results while using their actual performance as feedback towards continuously learning and improving.
But isn’t it the process
During the 90s, we saw a lot of attention paid to Business Process Reengineering (BPR). There are many people who believe that it is not really the people but the process that is important. It is our belief that it is never one or the other. There needs to be a balance. An article from Knowledge@Wharton states that “looking at stock performance going back to 1990, the majority of companies in the top quartile of performance combine attention to process with attention to executive development”.
[See the next issue of The Quantum Leap for further exploration into the balance of process and people]
In summary, the key to success in execution is a plan that:
1) Will get the right products to the right customers at the right time
2) Is fully communicated throughout the organization
3) Has a well thought-out implementation plan with metrics
4) Is monitored regularly
5) Is executed by people that are held developmentally accountable
6) Optimizes processes for the particular strategy being executed. |
