Walking the talk

So you have done your deep introspection, conducted SWOT, PESTEL and all kinds of acronym analyses, surveyed your customers and employees, prepared scenarios for the future evolution of your market and taken a peek into what your competitors are doing. You have cracked heads with your in-house team for several months or worked with consultants like me, you have written a bold new vision for your organisation and are ready to confidently step into the future. You have stepped up to the white line, set and settled yourself on the mark.

Bang! And they're off…

It's strategy execution time.

During the lead up to the 1987 Mike Tyson vs Tyrell Biggs fight, Tyson was asked by a reporter whether he was worried about Biggs’ plan. In a simple sentence, Iron Mike summarised the strategy vs execution problem perfectly:

“Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the face.”

Since no organisation has a strategy that plans for less customer delight, more customer churn, sub-standard production, low value products, overworked underpaid unhappy employees, toxic low performance culture, uncollected receivables, unpaid payables, diminishing revenue and less market share, why is it that some organisations achieve these results?

Every organisation has a strategy, ‘till they get punched in the face by execution.

Now, let's be honest... That strategic planning process that you ran, the one where you did the deep introspection, genuine retrospection, and prepared a balanced projection of the future, how much of your time and energy did you invest in that process as a leader? How much resource did you apply to that strategic thinking? Did you really give it your best shot?

Regarding the implementation of your strategy, how hard did you think about it? How much of your time and energy did you spend putting together a concrete execution plan?

If strategy and execution is so important to you and your organisation, how much time and resources do you dedicate to it?

Many organisations get punched in the face by strategy and execution even before they walk into the ring.

Let's assume that we have ran a solid camp and prepared ourselves as best as we can for the big fight. It's fight night. It's Thriller in Manilla, the Rumble in the Jungle. How do we survive the 15-round battle and effectively execute our strategy for success?

Here are some reflections that I have put together on execution.

1. Strategy execution is not an event. It is the daily actions and behaviours that we perform. You, the leader, must explain how the daily actions and behaviours of your team members directly relate to the strategy and its achievement. You must set clear expectations on behaviour and establish mechanisms for rewarding the desired behaviour and sanctioning undesirable behaviour. This connects the daily doings of you and your people - your organisation’s culture - to the strategy and the results that you want.
2. To make execution practical, you must break your strategy down into themes or pillars, programs, projects and tactical plans. These tactical plans are the weekly and daily work that needs to be completed. You should then clearly communicate to the team the expectations of what they should be working on and which tasks should be completed by when. Hold people accountable for meeting those deadlines. By decomposing your strategy in this way, it will be clear to your team how their day to day work directly contributes towards the strategy and its achievement. An organisation without such a clear decomposition of its strategy is like a football team without game tactics. What do you do when you have the ball in your half? Pass it to whoever is unmarked? What do you do during opposition corner kicks? Make a wall? What do you do if your opponent scores? Blame the goalkeeper?
3. A big reason why organisations struggle with strategy execution is that many organisations do not prioritise the most important initiatives and instead work on any good ideas that come their way. Do not be like many organisations. Develop a clear prioritisation process with criteria that is focused on the strategic priorities. Communicate this criteria to your team to empower them to be able to self-select the tasks, activities and projects that are aligned to strategy. This will focus your team’s efforts on only those projects that are linked to strategy. You don't want your team to spray their efforts around and pray for good results, you want them to take aim and shoot.
4. Allocate the appropriate resources to your high-priority initiatives. To be clear, “resources” means people (especially people with high-enough rank or seniority for decision making), tools, money and time. Your resource allocation tells your people what is important and gives them what they need to get their work done. Without this, you might as well throw in the towel in the first round.
5. For each of your execution initiatives, the programs and projects that we have for our strategy execution, set measurable goals for each. These goals can be tied to financial or operational outcomes or the completion of key initiatives. These goals illustrate the link between people’s daily work and your strategy performance and drive behaviour. Goals should be linked to incentives to drive alignment between everyday people actions and behaviours and the strategy that you are trying to execute.
6. People do what they get paid to do. Simple.? If incentives are not aligned to goals and strategic outcomes, you will simply not achieve the results that you want. After defining the key strategic initiatives that you want to pursue, laying out the priorities for the organisation and setting goals, you have to link individual and team incentives to the successful completion of those activities. Yes, this may require changing compensation plans or offering bonuses contingent upon execution of strategic objectives, but that's the price for your strategy execution. Too many leaders rely on motivational speeches, metaphors of the organisation being a family, vague promises to teams and individuals and hope as their primary incentive mechanisms. They have never and will never work.
7. In a boxing match, each round is typically 3 minutes long. At the end of each round the boxer takes a break to get patched up and take score of their performance. In a similar way, you need to dedicate regularly scheduled time to review the progress of your strategy, review your market assessment, track key initiative progress and key metric performance, and understand how things are changing around you. Individual projects should be measured against deliverables and goals while key metrics should be measured for variances from the plan that you have laid out. Communicate progress to the team, hold people accountable, and award or withhold incentives based on their performance so as to reinforce the right behaviours.
8. Positive reinforcement drives the right repeat behaviours. When the team does something well or completes a major milestone, take time to celebrate it. Communicate that event across the organisation and explain to people how that success has led to the achievement of a strategic objective. How do you do this? Write about it on your internal blog. Send out a newsletter. Hold award ceremonies. Provide strategy updates to the entire organisation. You as a leader have to take time out to celebrate your team’s success. When people on your team distinguish themselves for being excellent at executing a plan, help them grow: promote them, increase their scope of responsibility, train them for larger roles, etc. Actions like these send a strong message to them and their peers about what is valued in the organisation. When people know how and why their work matters, and they are recognised and rewarded for it, engagement increases and performance improves.

Execution is a force multiplier of strategy. An average strategy that is implemented with?excellent execution beats an excellent strategy that is implemented with average execution. And no amount of strategic brilliance makes up for poor execution.

Go get 'em, Champ!