The discipline of execution-TLD17

Over the last few months, I have been reflecting on execution as a leadership and management discipline and its critical role in delivering outcomes. Generally, we tend to concentrate on planning and leadership and lay little emphasis if any on execution.

Execution is the arm of leadership that I call ?????? ???? ???????? ????????????????????. It is a skill and a habit that a leader must have to move teams from sweet vision talk to the reality of implementation. Execution is about not just getting it done but is done right to produce expected outcomes and if possible exceed the expectations.?

How do you define a leader who develops plans and has them well laid out however, at the end of the planning period, over 40% of the activities are not yet accomplished??

When a team agrees to do certain tasks and each member is allocated the tasks then at the point of review, more than 20% of the members assigned the tasks are yet to finish them.

Have you taken time to reflect on your minutes of meetings for the last year and checked whether all the planned activities were implemented?

What was the outcome? At a personal level, do you accomplish all your New Year resolutions, or towards the end of the year, there are more resolutions left than the year??

To be successful in realizing positive outcomes, we must build a strong culture of execution. What is execution? The discipline of ensuring things are done excellently and on time.? Execution is the bridge between promises made to the stakeholders of the organization and the outcome. When decisions are being made but there is no follow-through to ensure implementation or when actions that need to be taken are not taken then we can only land in a chaotic environment that has more ambitions and desired results than the results themselves.

Even the term Chief Executive Officer is not about a position of grandeur and pomp but a position of execution. An executioner is not discouraged by the complexity of a matter rather they are inspired by it. Initially, in my leadership assignments especially where am on the board, I thought my work was strategy formulation, thinking from the mountain top then this bomb hit me hard. I realized that my hands must be soiled. I must take a keen interest in execution otherwise the outcome may not give me the results I longed for and set out to realize.

In his book, How Toyota changed the World, Dennis Chambers writes the following about one of the executive? founders:?

"Sometime during this period, Kiichiro established a kind of semiformal policy he had learned from his father- a policy that all Toyota managers would practice from then on. The fledging car company would practice a "hands-on" style. The principle is simple: Few things are to be learned in one's office. Managers roll up their sleeves and get to work out where the real work is. One finds and corrects problems by seeing them up close with one's own eyes. Theory is fine for the classroom at the university; successful business people get their hands dirty. Two generations later, when Toyota was banging heads with Detroit's leading carmakers for world supremacy, this policy came into stark reality.?

Detroit executives sailed to work in chauffeur-driven limousines. They bypassed the noisy factory floor to catch elevators that whisked them up to skyscraper offices where people spoke in whispers and there was not even the hint of the smell of motor oil. They frequently left early for lunch and just as frequently talked business with each other between putts at the country club.

Toyota executives,? in contrast, walked the factory floor every day and surprised no one when they dropped onto their backs and pushed under a car on the line with a flashlight light to search for the source of an annoying rattle caused by a loose screw.? They enjoyed a few rounds of golf. And lunch was routinely a tuna sandwich eaten while hunched over schematic drawings."

Success is possible when managers and executives get down to work by doing what they have been thinking. It is not micro-managing. It is not the inability to delegate. It is not disempowerment.? It is bringing reality to work. If a leader does not get to execute the whole of one's efforts may just be in vain. Execution is making plans to happen. It is a process that demands we ask questions for in those questions we discover we have more answers than when just answers are given. Questions like: Is the plan ambitious? Is the plan sharp or scattered? Are we pursuing more ideas than we can handle? Why this idea and not the others? How strong are we to execute??