When people think of strategy, they tend to focus on planning and design: getting the right people from the right bus – to identify what the company should be doing. As Wharton Professor, Lawrence Hrebiniak, notes in Making Strategy Work: Leading Effective Execution and Change, without adequate attention to execution –  changing behaviors that are currently leading people in the former direction and  executing new behaviors to achieve the new direction – success cannot be achieved.
He notes four sources of the “knowing-doing†gap:
- Leaders are trained to plan rather than execute
- Senior leaders tend to leave execution to lower-level leaders and team members; they review progress only periodically
- Strategy formulation is typically done by relatively few people; execution is a team- or business-wide endeavor
- Formulating a strategy is an action step; execution is a continuous, long-term process.
When I teach strategy for CUNY, I share experiences from companies in the news and those of the CEOs with whom I work at Vistage Worldwide (which serves 21,000 established CEOs), to drive home the “gap†problem. Key is an ongoing system to:
- Monitor people’s execution performance
- Hold them accountable for actions related to the new strategy and the underlying cultural values (as we discuss at Eval2Win.com – see overview)
- Provide people with ongoing learning opportunities to acquire and perfect the new skills they need. (This is easier if your company is a CILO (Continuous Improvement Learning Organization) where learning is an essential part of the each aspect of a staff’ person’s job description.
Indeed, Vistage Inside was created to help CEOs change the organization to better align senior executives to the strategy and culture, increase collaboration and teamwork, facilitate learning by the staff they supervise, and hold people accountable to one another (e.g., members of the executive team to each other and employee-supervisor dyads to each other).
How well are you executing on your strategy? Is it easy to understand and compelling? Does everyone know what they should do? Are people ready, willing and able to perform their strategic activities? How well are you and the senior team holding everyone accountable for success? If the answers aren’t positive, what are you doing to improve? Contact us for help: jerrycahn@presentationexcellencegroup.com.