How to achieve effective business execution
Effective business execution requires four basic components: clarity, focus, accountability, and leader involvement.
A clear strategic objective can give a company direction, vision, and focus, but I have come to understand through long experience it is completely meaningless without effective execution. In fact, a completely average strategy with extremely effective execution will always win over brilliant strategy and poor execution.
Business is almost nothing without execution.
If we can't accomplish simple goals, you absolutely cannot accomplish meaningful, complicated, and long-term objectives. I believe that effective business execution requires four basic components: clarity, focus, accountability, and leader involvement.
Clarity
Too often, it's not entirely clear even to the executive team what objectives they are trying to achieve. Sure, they're trying to hit quarterly numbers, but quarterly numbers are not something someone executes against. The further from the executive team you get, the less likely employees will understand how their functions relate to EBITDA, quarterly profits, or even top-line revenue.
Effective business execution requires clarity from the top to the bottom of the organization on what needs to be accomplished. That means middle managers must understand exactly what needs to be accomplished, when it needs to be done, and why it is so important. Only then can they translate company objectives into the tactics that their team will execute.
Focus
One of the classic mistakes that businesses make is to not focus their attention. How granularly we must focus is directly related to the amount of resources committed to the initiatives. A sprawling, worldwide organization can clearly have more than one initiative so long as the different initiatives do not overlap with the same resources.
The common cliche which should set off alarm bells for most middle managers is when an executive says, "We must be able to walk and chew gum at the same time." The executive is not wrong, but usually that saying is used as an excuse to avoid the very difficult task of prioritizing, and the even more difficult task of deprioritizing.
Early in my career, I expressed concern that my team simply could not accomplish all that I was being asked to accomplish. My boss nonchalantly said, "You're a smart guy, you'll figure it out." Unfortunately, as a smart guy, I did figure out that the executives didn't really know what they wanted to accomplish.
Accountability
Accountability can be a dirty word. If it is used as a way of justifying punishment, curtailing initiative, and deflecting blame, the idea of accountability can actually destroy execution, morale, and employee initiative.
The accountability that is absolutely essential to execution is pushing down as much agency over a project as far into the organization as is practicable. Asking an organization to execute against a plan, but giving them none of the ability to make decisions only slows progress. Executives become bottlenecks as even the most arcane decisions need to be made by executives who are ill-equipped to make them.
If you can give employees true accountability over parts of the business plan, and give them the latitude to exercise that accountability, you will make much more progress more quickly than you otherwise could.
Leader Involvement
I worked at a company once that was going through a crisis. It was clear from the top to the bottom of the organization that we would all need to pull together in order to help the company succeed. When I needed to take a personal phone call I knew that the best place to go was the executive wing because leadership was never around.
One of the worst things a leader can do is to dictate what needs to be done and provide no support, oversight, or committed involvement in the progress of the project. It's important that the leader is not micromanaging, but employees can see whether executives truly care about an issue based on how much involvement the executive has in the issues. If the executive is a hammer for weekly meetings to slam the lack of progress, they might get some short-term results, but they will pay the price in morale and long-term efficiency. If, on the other hand, executive involvement results in the removal of obstacles, the reallocation of resources, and the benefit of the leader's considerable experience, then employees would be excited about working on corporate initiatives.
Much of what I learned about corporate execution came from my experience in the retail world. I used to say that what makes retail so interesting is that it is actually pretty simple: you need to have the products people care about at the price they're willing to pay at the time that they need it. Retail is simple, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. Corporate execution is the exact same way. It's not complicated, but that doesn't mean it's easy.
