The Proven Formula for: Winning the Execution Game
Execution is everything. Plan all you want, dream all you can, then turn that key or you’ve accomplished nothing. Execution is what separates those who merely have lofty ideas from those who end up winning the game. It’s about taking strategies and making sure they are implemented with power.
Creating a culture of execution is a leadership issue. It combines creating a “no-excuses, get-it-done” culture with the systems, processes, and accountabilities that ensure things are done consistently and done well.
But it’s also more than a leadership issue. People at every level in an organization can get bogged down in planning and strategizing without ever getting off the pot.
[wcm_restrict]It’s easy to guess which things in a company are measured and audited: It’s the things that people actually DO and do well. If you want something done with fairly strong consistency, set measurable expectations.
But don’t forget to put systems in place to see if the benchmarks are being met. If a standard is measured in the forest, and no one is there to audit it – does it make a difference? Not bloody likely. Why should it?
You can’t monitor and audit every facet of your business, or you won’t have time to run the business. So where does execution matter most? It matters most in the critical moments I call Moments of Truth – the moments where execution can mean the difference between success and failure.
Moments of Truth are those critical times when a customer forms an impression of you, deciding whether your offerings and their standards see eye-to-eye. Though they vary from industry to industry and business to business, every business has them. Define them, create measurable goals and a way to assess progress, and GO.
Use weekly planning meetings in which each attendee declares focused results based on your drivers following a clean process and you will create magic. These meetings create the engine to keep people focused on doing the right things and getting results in the areas that matter. It also reveals the “stealth slackers” – those who are otherwise masterful at hiding and looking busy. Got some of those?
Top performers don’t just stay busy – they know how to get the RIGHT things accomplished. Top performing leaders also know how to get their people focused on doing the right things, especially those things intimately tied to the Moments of Truth that can make or break a company. They know that accepting no excuses from their team members means permitting no excuses from themselves as well.
For an organization to thrive in these highly competitive times, it is more critical than ever that leaders build an environment where their word is law. Only by conveying that attitude can they expect others to be held to the same standard.
Miracles are supposed to happen, but they require a steadfast, ironclad system of execution and a leader who is committed to making the miracle happen. So be the miracle![/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]
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About the Author
Roxanne Emmerich’s Thank God It’s Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love
Leadership Inspirations – Positive Thinking
“Enthusiasm releases the drive to carry you over all obstacles and adds significance to all you do.”
Norman Vincent Peale
Protestant minister and author of The Power of Positive Thinking
Work Stinks? Get Yourself Back Into that First Work-Day Feeling
Remember your very first day on the job? Your shoes had a shine like the tiles on the Space Shuttle and the crease in your slacks could have diced celery. The air was somehow fresher, the birds chirpier. You had been hired. You’d been given a chance to excel, a chance to make a difference.
Now contrast that with this morning.
[wcm_restrict]Most people who signed up for the Big Game end up making one compromise after another until they’ve resigned themselves to mediocrity. It’s darned hard to keep that first-day buzz going.
BUT… there’s no reason you can’t choose to recover a good measure of that first-day feeling, that striving for excellence, and put it to good use in the service of everyone whose lives you touch on a daily basis.
It’s all about making the choice to do it.
Finding your enthusiasm again
Have you ever met a two-year-old who wasn’t enthusiastic? We come prepackaged with it. And then…
What happens to us?
What happens is that we make a choice. Some of us choose to make the effort to stay in touch with our inner enthusiasm. Others find reasons to lose touch with it – boredom, responsibilities, challenges, fatigue.
But here’s the problem: Enthusiasm is the lifeblood of all success. Without it, nothing great happens. If you choose to lose touch with your inner enthusiasm, you are choosing mediocrity. It’s really that simple.
Sure, there are plenty of reasons to curb your enthusiasm. But there are just as many reasons to find it again – to celebrate your incredible good fortune, and in the process, to make that fortune even better.
Start with the fact that you’re not dead yet, that you were born at all, that you have a job, and that compared to a lot of folks, you have a pretty darn good job.
Now take a close look at the circumstances of this good job you have. Write down your five biggest complaints and spin them into positives. For example, “My boss micromanages me” can be reframed as “My boss cares enough about me to step into my work when I need help.”
If you’ve truly committed to finding your first-day buzz again, you should be an awful lot closer to it now than you were ten minutes ago.
All this rethinking and reframing has removed a HUGE energy drain from your life – one you were probably unaware of. It takes massive amounts of energy to continually reinforce your own sense of victimhood. Excellence is MUCH less expensive. Now that you feel lucky instead, what on Earth are you going to do with all that energy?
How about playing the Big Game you signed up for?
What you’ve just filled yourself up with is a lion’s share of this precious thing called the human spirit, and the human spirit will not invest in mediocrity. So play the meaningful, bighearted game you always dreamed of playing, and leave the mediocrity to others.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]
Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:
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About the Author
Roxanne Emmerich’s Thank God It’s Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love
Top 5 Networking Tips if Your Company is Going Through Layoffs
- Stay positive. Regardless of if you get laid off or stay in your job, your attitude will have an impact on your future. Try to look for the positive and find ways to cheer up others who might be having a tough time with the changes.
- Start networking early. If you wait until you get the pink slip you will have missed the opportunities to forge strong relationships. If you only network when you need something (like a new job), then people will see you are one sided in your networking. Show up and try to help others with their goals before you need their help.
- Do not say bad things about your company. If your company is experiencing tough times, do not be gossiping inside or outside the business about what is happening. People are always cautious about those who gossip and spread bad news. They worry about what you say about them when they are not in the room, and this will not lead them to help you later if you are in search of a new job. Who would want to hire someone who tells stories all over town about their last employer?
- Be visible inside the company and around town. Out of sight is out of mind. Hiding in your cubicle and thinking that by being invisible will help you keep your job might backfire. Doing good work and completing your projects is very important in tough times, but do not rationalize that that is all you have to do to stay employed.
- Make sure you have your resume and LinkedIn profile up to date. Do not wait until you are laid off to update these critical job seeking tools. Make sure that you have everything up to date so that you can immediately use them if you are suddenly laid off.
About the Author
Thom Singer is the author of six books on the power of business relationships and networking, including: Some Assembly Required: How to Make, Grow and Keep Your Business Relationships (New Year Publishing, 2007), The ABC’s of Networking (New Year Publishing, 2007), Some Assembly Required: A Networking Guide for Women (New Year Publishing, 2008), and Batteries Not Included: 66 Tips to Energize Your Career (New Year Publishing, 2009). He also writes the Some Assembly Required Blog and is the creator of the free online Networking Quotient Quiz (www.nqquiz.com). Singer has over 18 years of sales, marketing, public relations, business development and networking experience in the business community, having worked for several Fortune 500 Companies and AM LAW 100 law firms. He regularly speaks at corporate seminars around the country teaching professionals the importance of cultivating business relationships to further their careers. Singer also leads training sessions as “The Conference Networking Catalyst” at large multi-day seminars focused on helping people make lasting connections with those they meet at the event. For more information about Thom Singer, visit http://www.thomsinger.com.
Tactical Execution Best Practice 4 – Eliminate Redundant Work
Whether in an economic recession or boom, resources are always limited and redundant work always an unnecessary resource expenditure. Yet no matter how hard leaders try to eliminate redundant work, these practices seem to reappear; often the result of well intentioned actions to correct a performance deficiency or misguided adherence to a legacy practice. Therefore, all leaders from the C-suite to the shop floor must relentlessly wage an ongoing war against unnecessary duplicate work.[wcm_restrict plans=”41022, 25542, 25653″]
Eliminating redundant work is not always easy. Regardless of why these tasks originated, they were almost assuredly justified by the very managers and workers overseeing and performing them; so these individuals will likely not recognize the actions as an unnecessary duplication of effort. And when identified, these individuals may be reluctant to relinquish the practice because of the prestige, authority, and/or employment the activity confers. At a minimum, eliminating the redundant task may appear to challenge the good judgment of those who conceived, authorized, or performed the task.
While not always easy, elimination of redundant work should always be pursued. The following are some suggestions to enhance the identification and ease the elimination of redundant work activities.
Identification
- Develop an end-to-end process flow and identify the workers performing each activity. No more than one person should be performing each task. Also, identify checks performed by computers and workers as this work effort is redundant. Lastly, look for instances where individuals transfer work documentation between multiple media (e.g. paper to computer) as this is also redundant work
Note: Second or peer checks and management authorization reviews for safety purposes are not redundant but are vital to maintaining personnel, operational, and asset safety. A foundational number of these reviews should be performed consistent with industry best practices. In some instances, these checks are legally required.
- Managers observe employees’ work end-to-end; giving special attention to transitions between employees where redundancies are likely to occur and go unrecognized
- Peers from other work groups or outside consultants observe end-to-end work flows. Impartial eyes are often more likely to identify subtle redundancies than those close to the work
- Survey/interview those new to the organization. Their recent outside perspective will often reveal duplicate work effort particularly if the result of a legacy practice
Elimination
- Train executives, managers, and employees to recognize unnecessary duplicate work
- Establish an organizational understanding of the need to continuously improve through constant quantitative reminders of relevant performance imperatives (e.g. organizational results-based performance versus that of leading competitors)
- Create a culture that embraces continuous improvement by encouraging and rewarding those who identify opportunities for improvement
- Establish forums within which employees can challenge organizational traditions and ‘sacred cows’
- Don’t assign blame for the existence of redundant activities, instead, highlight their identification and elimination as an organizational learning opportunity
- In the extreme case where staffing reductions occur because of activity elimination, seek to assign displaced workers elsewhere within the organization or help them find positions with another firm
Prevention
- Train executives, managers, and employees, especially those who write and approve policies and procedures, to recognize redundant work
- Adapt project management and corrective action processes to assess for redundancy before implementing procedure changes
- Update software implementation procedures to assess for duplicate computer-human activities
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)
Founding Father of the United States of America[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”41022, 25542, 25653″]
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