Whether it is the corporate strategy process or the one for the business unit, there are some areas, where many companies set themselves up to already fail on execution even before the operational plan is initiated. While most will do a good job of analysing their environment and outlining a clear strategy, they will often miss critical process steps which will create a gap between the strategic intent and the final plan, these include.
The four pivotal processes (refer to the science of execution model) stand as pillars that rely on astute leadership. Effective leadership must possess the following capabilities to foster a thriving execution environment:
Successful execution requires a culture that has high levels of trust, open communication and frequent public praise, rewards, and recognition to demonstrate to the rest of the organization that execution behaviours are desired. Further, the culture ensures high levels of accountability, visible through managing in a timely and decisive manner any person that is unable to keep their execution committments.
From an execution perspective, there are 2 key insights on prioritising. These are further explored in the excellent review of the topic by the Franklin Covey Institute.
This is the most visible execution process and often has the most attention during planning and delivery cycles. However, despite the attention, it remains prone to common process gaps.
In most organisations, the people development process in isolation is robust however an execution gap arises when it is weakly linked to the business planning process. This is a huge mistake as it is critical, a formal assessment of the capability needed to execute the plan is undertaken. While it sounds obvious, if the skills and resources to execute the plan are not available, then they either need to be requested in the annual plan or the plan's ambition needs to be scaled back, in many business planning cycles resourcing to execute the plan is assumed even when a cursory assessment would show otherwise, in that regard
The Governance process is the place where behaviour change happens. For perspective in a survey Bain & Co completed across 184 companies, it found that 65% of initiatives required significant behaviour change. However, in many cases, the Governance process rather than a driver of change is a source of significant inefficiencies. Most commonly due to either insufficient discussion and investment early on to determine the lead measures that will meet KPIs/budget or the frequency of review meetings being too low. In the absence of knowing the lead measures and having a weekly scorecard, the Governance process regularly becomes a diffuse, more opinion rather than fact-based discussion resulting in missed opportunities to course correct early and quickly. This gap almost always results in ineffective execution, in R&D it can result in poor-performing projects consuming time and investment for much longer than necessary, in manufacturing it can result in poor planning decisions and low yields in commercial loss of customers and in all cases ultimately impact on financial performance.
