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Archive for the ‘Accelerating Execution’ Category
PDF A Strategy Execution Tune-up for the New Year
January 3rd, 2012 by Jocelyn Davis
Here we are again: starting a new year. If you’re like me, you’re looking back on everything your business unit or team accomplished in 2011 and feeling a touch of pride — but also a touch of frustration. As usual, there’s a bunch of stuff that either didn’t happen, happened too slowly or didn’t achieve the desired result. If this sounds familiar, I have a great gift idea for your leadership team: an execution tune-up.
Recently, the senior leadership team of a large hospitality and entertainment company engaged us to ‘climb under the hood’ and diagnose the things that were slowing their team down. In this post on SmartBrief on Leadership, I share the traps into which this team fell (many of which may sound familiar to you), as well as the tactics we took to identify and overcome those traps.
From all of us at Forum, here’s to a successful 2012 for you and your team.
Leading Virtual Teams: Where’s the Buzz?
August 8th, 2011 by Tom Atkinson
I once walked the floor of a mail-processing plant with a senior manager from the United States Postal Service. I was struck by the volume of activity, with hundreds of workers at dozens of stations dutifully sorting, stacking, and moving an enormous number of letters and parcels from one side of the stadium-sized facility to the other. I asked the manager how the evening was going (mail gets processed at night). He said performance was right on track. When I asked him how he knew, he pointed to some key metrics that the plant tracked, but he also said “After 20 years I don’t really need to rely on each operational metric; I just walk around and can tell quickly if people are on their game and the mail is moving the way it should.” Like a professional coach he had a higher-level understanding of the “buzz” and a sixth sense about how the game was going.
Contrast this managers’ experience with your own. Unless you work on a plant floor (and many of these are becoming automated), it’s getting harder and harder for managers to get a “feel” for how things are going. For information workers, the work itself is often intangible and difficult to measure. People work remotely, travel frequently and spend more time connecting electronically than face to face. I once heard a senior manager in a consulting firm ask, “Where is everyone? I hope they’re out making money!” In today’s fast-moving, distracting environment, individual effort is becoming more discretionary and harder to manage—despite the most carefully planned performance appraisal systems.
What’s a manager to do?
Forum’s research on strategy execution, featured in Strategic Speed, offers a framework for mobilizing employees around strategy execution. The three main levers are clarity, unity and agility:
4 Traps of Strategy Execution
August 3rd, 2011 by Steve Barry
Which of these four traps do leaders in your organization fall into after launching a strategic initiative?
- Jumping the Gun (Not taking time to thoroughly understand and communicate the impact of changes on the organization and people)
- Expecting More with Less (Failing to provide adequate resources for successful execution)
- Taking on the Next Big Thing (Confusing the organization by moving on to a new strategy or initiative)
- Being the Final Straw (Overloading people with multiple strategic or “special” projects and initiatives)
If you said, “Expecting More with Less,” you are not alone. Forty-six percent of the participants in our recent webinar, Driving Strategic Initiatives, responded as you did, indicating it as the No. 1 trap.
Tom Endersbe, guest speaker on the webinar, challenged this response. Having led a spinoff of a Fortune 300 company, Tom knows a thing or two about driving strategic initiatives. He believes that, although resources may be a challenge, they are more of a side-effect or symptom than a cause of failure. That is, leaders fail to consistently provide visible commitment to, recognition of, and rewards to an A-priority initiative. And so people supporting those senior leaders may lose motivation—or forget how it aligns to what they are doing—and place their resources elsewhere.
Tom is spot-on. In our blog post, Leader as Archaeologist, we outlined the “four hurdles to strategy execution,” as detailed in Blue Ocean Strategy. “Resources” are only a surface trap. To really drive change, leaders must not jump the gun; rather they must thoroughly understand the situation and identify the other hurdles (motivational, cognitive, and political). It’s all about mitigating execution risk, which is one of the three keys to driving initiatives to success. For tips on the three keys, watch the replay of our webinar.
Seven Leadership Actions that Accelerate Execution
May 3rd, 2011 by Jocelyn Davis Great news! About 70 percent of strategic initiatives fail.
Last year, we did some digging into that statistic and found that it’s well supported. Here are a few data points pulled from the dozens of research studies we reviewed:
- Seventy percent of reengineering initiatives fail.
- Eighty percent of major systems investments don’t get used or don’t deliver the intended impact.
- In one study of more than 100 companies, 52 percent of change projects failed and one-quarter of the companies reported a 92 percent failure rate.
When we studied what “failure” looks like, we found that it comes down to two things:
- Few initiatives achieve even two-thirds of the quantifiable performance results intended.
- Most initiatives run way beyond their deadline.
These tendencies hold for all types of organizations in all parts of the world. In other words, the great majority of companies today are facing an execution problem: the results of strategic initiatives they undertake are lacking or late—or both.
“Okay,” you say, “why is that great news?”
Because, even given the sea of companies that are failing at execution, you still have an excellent shot at making your company (or business unit or team) stand out from the crowd. If your organization can achieve a higher-than-30-percent success rate in its strategic initiatives—even if it achieves only a 50- or even 40-percent success rate—it will actually join an elite group of execution stars. And, as we detail in our book Strategic Speed , the financial benefits of being part of this Speedy Executors Club are significant.
Here’s even more good news: Our research shows that the path to achieving faster, more effective execution is not the one most people might think of: it’s not primarily a matter of installing more efficient (expensive) technology systems, nor is it a matter of dragging the organization through lengthy (expensive) process-reengineering efforts. Rather, it’s about ensuring that every leader in the company has the skills and the mind-set necessary for mobilizing people in service of the initiative.
We found seven leadership actions that predict faster, more effective execution of strategic initiatives and projects. Successful leaders take these actions both when they launch an initiative and repeatedly throughout its life:
Increase Clarity
1. Describe the what, why, who, how, when, and where of the initiative.
2. Craft relevant messages about the initiative that communicate its importance and value.
Foster Unity
3. Communicate about the initiative in a compelling way.
4. Create opportunities for others to engage in dialogue about the initiative.
5. Involve people in shaping the execution plan.
Promote Agility
6. Build into the execution plan opportunities to assess progress, identify obstacles, and correct course as necessary.
7. Take steps to reduce the impact of unanticipated events on execution.
Ironically, taking most of these actions requires slowing down at certain points. But, the resulting increases in clarity, unity, and agility pay off in the form of an overall acceleration in execution. Here’s how one leader in a large insurance company puts it:
It’s the “slowing down to speed up” concept: making sure there is clarity and unity and [that] we understand other individuals’ perspectives as we bring forward big projects. I need to get others to understand and bring them in, so people feel their perspective has been taken into account. [In a recent initiative I led] we spent a lot of time interacting and creating greater engagement with the field and managers. In the long run, we went faster.
To learn more about how to help leaders in your organization take the seven actions and reliably accelerate execution, check out our recent webinar on the topic, and see the fact sheet for our new program Accelerating Strategic Initiatives.
Executing Strategy Under Fire: Leadership Lessons from the U.S. Army
April 6th, 2011 by Tom Atkinson For business leaders, the ability to execute strategies with speed can make or break reputations and even careers. But for the U.S. Army it is literally a matter of life or death. In a recent visit with Col. Paul Bricker, we learned some lessons about military leadership that apply as well to business as to combat. The colonel’s insights about how to foster agility were especially interesting. Read the rest of this entry »
The Economy is Improving: Now What?
February 24th, 2011 by Jocelyn Davis It’s nice to feel a tailwind again.
Since 2008, many companies have been struggling against one of the worst economic headwinds in a century. Now, we’re starting to feel some momentum once more. Achieving our targets doesn’t feel like quite such a hard slog.
But—now is the perfect time not to relax. Read the rest of this entry »
Strategy Execution Around the Globe: Similarities and Differences
December 22nd, 2010 by Ed Boswell
In this recent blog post, we examined some of the challenges to achieving strategic clarity, unity, and agility in China. In this video, Ed Boswell, co-author of Strategic Speed, shares his observations on his recent trip around the world. Ed discussed strategy execution with senior leaders in Asia, India, and the Middle East, and found some interesting similarities and differences.
Ed Boswell – Global Differences from Forum Corporation on Vimeo.
Click the link above to view the video. Also, our email subscribers may have missed last week’s post, Seven Trends in Selling for 2011.
Executing Strategy in China
December 8th, 2010 by Tom Atkinson Do Chinese executives approach strategy execution differently than executives in the West? Do cultural differences create a diverse set of challenges?
Along with my Forum colleague Steve Barry, I recently had an opportunity to find out. We led a series of workshops on Strategic Speed for the top 100 leaders of a Chinese airline. These leaders came to the United States eager to learn best practices in leadership.
Our research on Strategic Speed led us to suspect that speed of strategy execution would be as much of an issue in China as in the rest of the world. In fact, we found that almost 90 percent of executives in our global survey rated speed of execution as critical to sustaining their business success, yet less than half viewed their companies as speedy. We found these “speed gaps” consistently across industry, geography, type of company, and business strategy.
Our research found that strategic speed is largely a leadership challenge, and the leader’s role is to create an environment characterized by three “people factors”:
- Clarity: People understand the company’s strategic priorities and how they apply to daily actions and decisions.
- Unity: People work smoothly across organizational boundaries toward common goals.
- Agility: People are responsive to changes in the environment, and they adapt accordingly, rather than sticking to a rigid plan.
It was fascinating to listen (through interpreters) to the Chinese airline’s executives wrestling with how to leverage these three people factors. The executives agreed that they are vital in driving strategic speed, but, just as in other companies and cultures, they can be difficult to leverage effectively. The executives also gave examples of ways they have addressed the following challenges in order to increase strategic speed:
- In a culture known for “top-down” management, how do you engage people in discussions of strategy so that everyone is clear on the direction?
- How do you encourage people to bridge organizational boundaries (and reward them for doing so) when they formerly were focused on maximizing unit performance?
- How can you foster agility by asking people to point out changes in the environment, when asking them to do so is itself a radical change?
Regarding clarity: One executive pointed out that, compared to American leaders, Chinese leaders tend to be more indirect in their communication with employees. The dilemma she manages is respecting the culture in which her employees feel comfortable, while creating sufficient clarity of direction to enable them to move with speed rather than working at cross-purposes.
Regarding unity: Another leader mentioned that, while it’s important that people be united, it’s critical that they be united in relation to the company’s strategic goal. He said that harmony is a key value in Chinese culture; people tend to go along with the mainstream, and they hesitate to voice different opinions. This tendency to “go with the flow” could engender a unity that doesn’t favor the company’s speed.
And regarding agility: Several leaders noted that Chinese employees are sometimes reluctant to identify problems in executing plans, for fear of bringing bad news to their managers. They discussed ways in which they might make the business environment more conducive to sharing information and learning from experience—both positive and negative.
What challenges do you face in achieving Strategic Speed in your company? To quickly assess your strengths and opportunities, complete our online assessment.
Lessons in Leadership: Clarity, Unity, and Agility at Gettysburg
November 18th, 2010 by David Carder
Cannons and muskets cut the sky like staccato thunder. Artillery whistled into the Union ranks, seemingly from all angles, and took a heavy toll. Acrid smoke stung the soldiers’ noses and burned their eyes. Through the haze, Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain spotted the rocky profile of Little Round Top, a hill that commanded a strategic view of the entire battlefield at Gettysburg. Chamberlain knew he must seize and defend that rocky hill at all costs, or risk being flanked and crushed by General Lee. Losing the hill would mean losing the battle, the Civil War, and likely, their lives.
In July 1863, Little Round Top proved to be a critical turning point for the Union soldiers. In October 2010, the craggy hill was the site of a pivotal and emotional event for a select team of leaders.
After massive changes to the U.S. health-care system, leaders at a global health-care organization found themselves at risk. The changes threatened the organization’s fiscal health and the viability of its operating model. In response, the leaders created a fundamentally new strategy. Now, it was up to them to drive it.
The leaders knew it would not be easy. Not only is U.S. health care a rapidly changing “battlefield,” but 80 percent of the leaders themselves had moved into new roles after a recent reorganization. The company retained Forum to equip the leaders to navigate individual and organizational transitions, rally around the new strategy, and drive the business forward.
Forum’s Strategic Speed model of clarity, unity, and agility served as an overall developmental framework. The organization’s multi-phased experience featured a blend of intensive executive coaching and targeted working sessions. As a powerful capstone to the development experience, top executives and high-potential leaders trekked to the battlefields of Gettysburg.
Treading the sodden earth of the battlefields, where so many gave up their lives for a cause greater than themselves, the executives took a more measured perspective on their challenges. Their trials faded in the context of the lives lost in battle. At the same time, the weight of their leadership, and the immediacy of its impact, expanded in light of their “feeling” the battle of Gettysburg from the inside out.
As the executives stood on the rocks of Little Round Top, they had no trouble viewing the lessons of the Civil War leaders through the lens of the Strategic Speed framework:
- Clarity: The Union forces focused on a critical few objectives, one of which was “seizing the high ground.” Though no Union general gave direct orders to seize the hill, Chamberlain acted quickly and with clarity.
- Unity: Only the ability of Chamberlain’s forces to hold the line and stay in tight formation around the top of the hill ensured their success.
- Agility: The Union forces improvised strategies to hold their position, responding to unforeseen threats from the Confederates and choosing the optimum moment to charge down the hill, when their forces were nearly depleted.
Chamberlain closed the battle of Gettysburg with a courageous, dramatic bayonet charge down the hill to successfully disperse the Confederate forces. I have no doubt that the executives of the health-care organization, though they are waging a different kind of battle in a different kind of haze and ambiguity, are now well equipped to take the bold and strategic actions required of them.
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