Aligning Your Goals

Patricia Leonard, Executive Vice President of the American Management Association, tells NGP about the importance of aligning the goals of your enterprise with the most important factor: your staff.

Before you start reading this, do me a favor: snap your fingers. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Nothing could be simpler, right? You think it, you do it.

In truth, although you may not realize it, that simple act is the end result of an incredibly sophisticated process. Start with the fact that at some early point in your life, you had to master the cognitive faculties to understand how to snap your fingers. Then you had to acquire the motor skills to actually do it – no small feat, considering the required degree of coordination between brain and body.

A complex chain of events involving trillions of neurons and synapses in your brain and an equally staggering amount of nerve endings throughout your body is triggered the moment you decide to snap your fingers. Each of those trillions of parts has to fire off at just the right moment, in just the right way, to make it all work. It’s actually a minor miracle that you can pull off this seemingly straightforward action. And you thought it was tough getting your business strategy executed.

Whether it’s snapping your fingers or marshalling your company’s resources to roll out a new strategy, execution – the process of turning vision into action, idea into reality – is never as simple as it first appears. When you think of the word execution, one of the phrases that spring to mind might be “making things happen”. That’s the wrong definition, though, because execution doesn’t just happen, as accidents do. Execution is the result of care, planning and an intricate system of roles and processes.

Just as the act of snapping your fingers is a learned behavior that connects the intellect with the motor skills to perform what is not a natural or reflexive act, strategy execution is the alignment of resources, processes, and learning. Indeed, it does not just happen.

To gain a clearer understanding of the factors underlying exceptional execution, American Management Association commissioned The Keys to Strategy Execution, a global study of more than 1500 business professionals conducted by the Human Resource Institute. The study found that there are 10 factors that directly impact execution today and will continue to do so in the future:

Customer needs and demands
In the pursuit of a grand vision, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the customer. To cite just one recent example, Dell Computers became so focused on maintaining its direct-sale business model that its once-stellar customer service has suffered and contributed to a decline in the company’s fortunes. Dell’s story is just one of many cautionary tales that demonstrate that the competency of consistent customer focus is synonymous with execution.

Workforce capability
Some might ask: shouldn’t execution be taken for granted? One would like to assume that most people will do what’s asked of them as a matter of course, without any need to impress upon them the importance of execution. That’s their job, after all. The truth is, however, that no matter how talented or dedicated your people or how brilliant your strategy, execution doesn’t just happen. Especially in today’s knowledge economy, with many companies pursing multiple strategies, execution is doomed to failure unless workers understand the vision and the strategies, have the skills to implement them, and are motivated to do so. The competency of talent management – of having not only the right people, but giving them the training and resources they need to succeed – is central in the search for execution.

Organizational resilience
Nothing stops execution dead in its tracks like fear of failure. We’ve all heard it before: every at bat can’t be a homerun. There has to be space in the organizational psyche to execute as best you can and build from there. Building the competency of organizational resilience demands the recognition that even if you strategize brilliantly and execute flawlessly, failure can happen. It’s not enough to passively accept the possibility of failure; organizations must actively acknowledge that it can happen, provide guidance on contingencies wherever possible, and make clear what the expectations are for stakeholders in helping the organization learn, recover, and move on from a failed plan. Overcoming a risk-averse mindset requires welcoming all ideas, even the most impractical ones, with a nonjudgmental approach.

Internal creativity and innovation
The dizzying speed of the innovation cycle has upped the stakes in execution. Researchers Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies have estimated that where the full cycle – from idea to invention to introduction to imitation – once took 30 to 40 years, the time is now more like 30 to 40 weeks. Staying ahead of that curve requires a seamless union between the competencies of innovation and execution.

As much as it is defined by competencies such as the above, however, execution is also a set of processes. Metaphorically speaking, the processes that accompany these competencies are the neurons and synapses that carry the signals that make the fingers snap. The American Management Association seminar Strategic Planning Tools, Techniques and Implementation emphasizes several specific key processes that align with the top four competencies and many of the other execution-critical factors identified in the HRI study:

1. Provide direction. On the set of a movie, the director gives the actors insight into the characters they’re playing, tells the lighting crew where and how to illuminate each scene, and coordinates a hundred other activities all to achieve a singular vision. Without direction, the entire production would fall apart. A similar truth applies in strategy execution, as suggested by the factor of “clear corporate identity” found in the AMA/HRI study. All of the various players have to know what the goal of the endeavor is, what the expected outcomes are, the resources they have to access, what their role is in the overall design, and what they need to do to make that role successful.
2. Foster alignment and linkage. Giving direction as to the final goal is crucial, but getting (and keeping) everyone going in the same direction is just as important. Alignment and linkage ensure that work plans, people and resources continue to stay on the same path. Linkage is the extent to which various plans within the organization are connected to each other. These connections are created by the development, documentation, and implementation of various organizational plans that are intended to support the overall strategy. Common plans include strategic initiative plans, core process plans, function/department plans, and personal performance plans. Alignment is the degree to which the organization’s people and resources are supporting the organizational strategy. Effective alignment is driven by having the appropriate organization structure and relationships in place, cascading performance measures within the organization, and assigning accountability for results. These practices align with both the need for clear corporate identity and employee commitment as outlined in the AMA/HRI study.
3. Get buy-in. For people to have a positive impact on the execution of strategy, they must have both commitment and energy to contribute to its effective delivery. Commitment is the extent to which people in the organization have voluntarily bought in to the strategic planning process and the degree to which they have a sense of responsibility for making it happen, given the opportunity of providing input in decisions that directly impact them. Energy is the willingness on the part of people to make an extra effort that requires personal sacrifices to contribute to the success of the business. The AMA/HRI study factors of “employee attitudes and behaviors” as well as elements of a “shared sense of commitment” support this approach.

The good news is that though difficult to master, execution is a competency that transcends circumstance; strategies change, but the skills that define the ability to achieve exceptional execution do not. Coupled with a strong strategic goal, it can be argued that as long as a company possesses the ability to execute, all other concerns are secondary. So help your organization learn to execute…with a goal of making it seem as simple as snapping your fingers.