“For CFOs, [it’s important to] help your organization move from strategic concepts to the fewest number of executable targets,” said Chris McChesney, global execution practice leader, FranklinCovey, at the FEI Leadership Summit in Boca Raton, Florida.
“There’s an art to that, and if you want to move to playing a strategic role in your organization, help the organization move from concepts to finish lines in the fewest number of battles necessary to win the war. If you can do that, you’re making an enormous contribution.”
One of the primary reasons organizational initiatives fall short of their stated objectives, McChesney said, is that companies often add too many goals to their transformation efforts. As leaders and team members try to juggle a variety of well-intentioned good ideas, complexity creeps in and the projects starts a low stumble toward irrelevance and finger-pointing.
“If I talk to any one of you about your strategy, it’s going to be a long conversation and I’m going to need a nap afterwards, right?” McChesney said. “And execution doesn’t like complexity. The two best friends of execution are simplicity and transparency, but the problem is everyone’s strategy is complex.”
Another common hurdle teams have to guard against is the fact that human nature makes new ideas more attractive than the nuts-and-bolts effort and monitoring required to drive behavioral change and to transfer those ideas from whiteboard sketches to organizational improvements.
And when new initiatives conflict with daily work, tasks that are perceived as urgent are probably going to be addressed ahead of the important work associated with an improvement project.
“Ideas are sexy,” McChesney said. “Human being aren’t built for follow-through and accountability — we’re built for novelty and new ideas. There’s a work element to this...[and] you’ve got to fight the urge to jump to the next thing and the next thing.”
Begin With Focus
The first element in effective execution, McChesney said, is to begin a project by specifying the fewest of elements needed to drive the initiative’s overall success.
“Focusing on the wildly important goals is critical. You have to narrow the focus to the absolutely essential,” he said.
He cited the example of a trucking company that, to help improve profitability, decided to focus on reducing employee turnover. The company set a concrete goal of reducing turnover from 106 percent to 86 percent within a year.
The goal was effective because the company outlined its starting and ending points, and set a timetable for achieving the goal — a process McChesney summed up as defining going “From X to Y by When.”
“This is so hard, because you have to say no to some good ideas,” he said. “There are always more good ideas than your capabilities to execute. That’s the first, irrefutable law of execution.”
Choose the Right Indicators
Another important element in effective execution is taking time to define the most important indicators of a project’s success. Most projects focus on major goals, without understanding the front-line behaviors and resources that influence whether larger goals are attainable.
Returning to the trucking company example, McChesney said one of the company’s goals in improving retention was reducing the amount of downtime associated with vehicle repairs. While that appears to be a worthwhile effort and metric, he said the real value came from digging deeper and working with the company’s mechanics and parts departments to identify bottlenecks in their functions that, in turn, extended repair times.
Keeping Score
Another important element is allowing teams involved in a transformation effort to keep track of their success in improving the processes they’re responsible for. Allowing teams to keep score increases engagement and cooperation by making a potentially daunting process game-like
“If you have the right…measures, the team can tell immediately if it’s winning or losing,” McChesney said. “If it’s tough for the team to tell the score, the whirlwind [of daily tasks] takes over.”
Create a Cadence of Accountability
The fourth important discipline of execution McChesney outlined is creating a rhythm though the use of meetings on a regular schedule, such as weekly, in which team members recall successes they’ve achieved since the last meeting, discuss current challenges and highlight commitments for the coming week.
Returning to the trucking company example, he described seemingly small improvements, such as improving the availability of parts, allowing mechanics to order parts from service bays and adjusting work schedules, that were identified by front-line employees.
“Those are the kinds of things that aren’t urgent, but getting them wrong could kill a strategy,” McChesney said. “Those are the kinds of things you would never put into a strategic plan.”