CEOs: 5 Keys to Confidence in Executing the Strategy

Congratulations!  You're going into the year planning a new product launch!  Delivering to a large new customer account!  Or maybe you have a revamped strategic plan!  Exciting times!  

Now, what is your confidence level in your teams' ability to deliver? 

If your confidence is anything less than 100%, we have some valuable insight for you.

Most of us have a pretty good handle on the following best practices:

• Communicating objectives  
• Assigning responsibility 
• Measuring performance - KPIs   
• Developing plans with due dates 
• Monthly management meetings 
• Weekly department meetings 
• Metric boards with daily stand-up meetings 
• ERP system 
• Lean / Six sigma / Root Cause Analysis 
• Leadership Training / Coaching 

There's one thing missing from the above list, and it has made all the difference for us between achieving or not achieving what we need to accomplish in our organizations.

What's missing from the above list?

Accountability.

 Confidence in executing the strategy comes from daily accountability. 

Here are five keys to empowering accountability:

1. Be clear on your business objectives.    

Make it a point to ensure your senior leaders are aligned on your objectives. 

It might sound obvious, but we've seen lack of clarity and commitment on objectives de-rail and de-value companies. 

In one such instance, there were differing opinions on market verticals to serve. The prevailing mindset was that any opportunity was a good one if it could make money.

This lead to 70 disparate projects, with no way for the development and delivery teams to successfully execute. 

What about you?  How have disparate objectives impacted team behaviors and outcomes in your business?

Getting senior leadership talking and agreeing on the targets ensures focus for everyone.

2. Translate objectives to your teams.  

Do it in a way that they can directly action and impact.

Here's a story of how this has gone well:

A business targeted an objective to deliver service in the healthcare space.

Subsequently, each department defined and targeted their own objectives toward that end:

• Sales and Marketing tees up leads in the space, with measurable targets
• Ops invests in processes to serve the segment and maximize efficiency
• Talent Management recruits people who have specifically relevant experience and relationships in the area
• Finance aligns with capital partners who share an interest in the segment
• MOST IMPORTANTLY, front line workers think about things like that messy corner in the warehouse to be cleaned up in order to meet SLAs for this market.  Or the need to more effectively document core processes. They're not tackling these improvements for improvement's sake.  Instead, these folks know their improvements are driving the business's targeted success.  Specifically.

Translating business objectives to team-specific objectives makes a concert of disparate instruments.

3. Give your teams a way to measure daily leading indicators.

You need to drive changes in behavior.  KPIs don't typically do that.  They reflect what happened during a prior period (quarter, month, or week).  By the time you have the data to review, it is too late to do anything about the metric, and it's too difficult to accurately identify root causes for poor performance.

Fix this by backing your KPIs into leading indicators that the teams can impact.

Here's a story to illustrate:

An executive in a manufacturing environment was struggling to improve employee safety.

Safety was typically measured by tracking the number of lost time injuries during the prior period.  

But they knew that for every lost time injury there were 30 first aid incidents.  

For every first aid incident there were 10 near misses.  

For every near miss there were 10 ‘at risk’ behaviors.  

Their leading indicator became ‘at risk’ behaviors.  

They knew ‘at risk’ behaviors occurred every day and they set their target to no ‘at risk’ behaviors observed each day.  

Each day employees would report any ‘at risk’ behaviors they observed. 

By doing this employees reinforced the importance of eliminating their ‘at risk’ behaviors and watching for ‘at risk’ behaviors by other employees.  

They understood the expectation and how it impacted their individual jobs.

They were able to change how employees viewed safety and empowered employees to be accountable for achieving the desired outcomes.     

The leading indicator provided positive pressure on employee behavior, and over time, they eliminated the ‘at risk’ behaviors.  

Used correctly, leading indicators influence employee behaviors to achieve desired outcomes.  

4. Give your teams the ability to make decisions and solve problems, daily.

 It’s a script:  

•  Huddle around the leading indicators. 
•  Ask, "Did we meet the desired threshold?"
•  If yes, move on.  
•  If no, answer why and record it.  Track the frequency of the issue.
•  Translate the issue to corrective action and record it.  Give it an owner and deadline.

When teams are really able to own their work and monitor daily whether or not they’re on track to deliver their part, it is energizing for them.  If the work is drifting or if problems occur, they can do something about it.

When you are driving the decision-making down into the organization like this, you are enabling execution through accountability. 

This is where accountability is happening, not as a punitive response to a quarterly report that says we’ve missed, but as a personal choice made by people in teams.  

Through this minimal amount of structure, you enable teams to truly own outcomes by giving them the information they need and the ability to act. 

You achieve ACCOUNTABILITY.

5. Tie individual and team accountability to the rest of the organization.

Businesses have central nervous systems no differently than the human body. A signal is sent telling you to pull your hand away from a hot stove, and you do.   Or your brain tells your muscles to move the pan because the potatoes are burning.  And you do. 

Why not architect the structure of that nervous system in your business?

By proactively instilling a structure or construct that allows the teams to “talk” to each other or call for help, we create an organization that has senses: organization-wide responses to the leading indicators each team is tracking. 

Teams and individuals are your first responders to triggering events.  

A structure for inter-team connectivity means they have built-in pathways for how to communicate with the rest of the organization. Just like the nervous system. 

It is reliable and responsive.

Accountability to the business objectives is shared.

Confidence in execution of the strategy comes from trust in the process that empowers accountability.

Learn How to Execute on Your Mission:

Aligning an organization to execute on a mission can be daunting. The key to success is instilling just enough structure that teams are, first, aware of their performance toward targeted outcomes, and second, empowered to make decisions and solve problems to that end. Leaders can create this environment. Visit our website to learn how we teach it. We also encourage you to download our Accountability eBook to get you started.

?About the author: Emily Bopp is shepherding a movement of excellence in execution by making over 100 years of management system evolution accessible to and adoptable by small-medium businesses. Through Enable, Inc., Licensed Enable? Consultants teach CEOs and their teams a reliable playbook for achieving outcomes. It gets everyone consistently delivering results.