Your strategy will only succeed if you execute it.
We talked about 4 common things that block organizations from making strategic progress on their business, and what to do about them:
1. Talking vs. Action
Smart Talking: Companies can get very practiced at talking about their strategy. Some people fall into the trap of believing that providing brilliant insights about what is going on in the business is adding value. It isn’t. Value comes from doing.
High Level Goals: High level goals are another form of talking. High level goals are motivating, but they are vague. They don’t tell people what they need to do when they get to work in the morning.
Clear, concrete steps. Strategic progress is made in concrete steps by specific people. We talked about how to translate high level goals into specific actionable steps that will ensure strategic progress.
2. Weak Alignment and Support
Passive vs. Active Agreement. There is a big difference between verbal agreements with nodding heads (passive agreement), and people being ready, willing, and committed to take action (active agreement).
Get the whole organization engaged. To make real strategic progress, you need to get the whole organization involved, engaged, motivated, and executing the strategic change.
Expose conflict. Being super-clear about what you expect in terms of defined tasks, measures and resource decisions raises conflict. But working through productive conflict is the only want to get active agreement.
We talked about the specific steps to get active agreement.
Deal with Sabotage. We talked about what do do when people are actively sabotaging strategic progress either because they disagree or are personally threatened by the change.
3. Lack of Measures and Accountability
Acknowledge Deadlines. The problem shows up when deadlines come and go and nothing happens. Too many organizations let this happen. You need to measure, track, and follow-up on the tasks that are required to make strategic progress.
Have the conversation. If a deadline is missed. You must deal with it! We talked about techniques to address missed deadlines and still keep team motivation high.
Show you are serious. The temptation to go back to the old way of doing things is very strong. You need to show your organization you are serious by communicating consistently, and by not making tactical decisions that undermine strategic progress.
4. Being too busy to do anything new
Tactical Pressure: Many organizations struggle to make strategic progress because they stay too busy working on the immediate demands of the current business.
Scaling. We talked about how to break the busy-ness cycle and focus key areas of the organization on scaling, even when it’s the boss who is the one blocking forward progress.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
All organizations struggle at some point to put their Strategy into Action (Read: actually get done what they say they want to do).
I find that key problems of executing are common in companies of all sizes and industries — but particularly in companies that want to scale.
Why?
Because people have to do new things to support the evolving business needs, and that’s hard.
It’s hard to get alignment, it’s hard to prioritize, and it’s hard to resist temptation and keep focus.
5 that block strategic progress (and how to fix them).
Or if you prefer reading, here is a brief summary.
5 things that block strategic progress:
1. Talk vs. doing
Problem:
Companies can get very practiced at talking about their strategy.
The trouble arises when people (at every level) don’t understand how to change their day to day work to do what the strategy requires.
Solution:
Translate the exciting, high level strategy-talk into much more mundane, concrete, measurable and trackable action items.
2. People don’t agree
Problem: Nodding heads around the table is a red flag!
It doesn’t mean people agree. It mostly means they think they’ll get out of the meeting faster if they nod their head. If people don’t agree, they won’t move forward in an aligned way. Your strategy stalls.
Solution:
You need to proactively smoke out the misunderstandings, unspoken disagreements, passive aggressive behaviors, and generally weak or apathetic support. Then you need to set up specific accountability.
3. Resource moves are not clear
Problem:
If you want to do new things, you need to move resources to do it.
Your strategy is where you put your resources.
If you are not super-clear about what resources will move, they will never move. Your strategy will not move forward either.
Solution:
Don’t expect your staff to make tradeoffs off-line to drive the new strategy. This never works. You need to do it top down in the light of day.
4. Too busy to change
Problem:
There is no extra time. Urgent crises, customer opportunities, or changing your mind usurps work on longer term strategic initiatives.
So you stay really busy but you don’t move forward or grow.
Solution:
Keep focus on strategic progress by setting measures and tracking progress. If you miss a deadline discuss it. Find out what happened. Never let strategic milestones slip by un-examined. This is a slippery slope into chronically bad execution.
5. Failure to engage and communicate with people
Problem:
The strategy gets stuck at the executive level.
You forget to tell the people who need to do the work what they need to do.
The inertia for people to keep doing what they are already doing is very strong.
Solution:
Create an ongoing communication plan throughout the entire process of executing the strategy. Motivate and engage people to get on board and give them personal reasons to care. Give them the tools to modify their work to support your new strategy.
Get it done this time
Most businesses know what they want to do, they just have some trouble actually doing it.
I work with companies to use my Strategy into Action Progam™ when they are ready to GO FAST. Contact me if you want to talk about this.
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About Patty Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
Many organizations struggle to get things done, as promised, on time.
Clearly tracking execution, which I talked about last time, is the critical first step to even knowing if you are are getting things done or not.
The question is, once you know what is slipping, what do you do about it?
What do you do when your team fails to deliver what you want? When they fail to execute on what you all keep talking about?
Conflict and difficult conversations
You can’t be a good General Manager and avoid conflict.
Great leaders know that part of the job is providing honest, fair, feedback to people, and enforcing consequences when deadlines and commitments are not met.
Motivation requires consequences.
Every time you avoid addressing an issue with someone who is not delivering, you destroy some trust, especially with your high performers.
In addition to degrading trust, an environment with no consequences offers no motivation or reward for performing. People think:
Why bother? Nothing happens if you don’t deliver on time, so why knock yourself out?
Lack of consequences is actually is de-motivating because people need their work to matter.
A good general manager will use every tool in the box to get people to personally care — to get people to emotionally invest in going the extra mile for the business.
Without measures and consequences, anything else you do for motivation is hollow and pointless. The work has to matter. If failing to get it done on time doesn’t matter, the work doesn’t matter.
Enforcing Consequences
So how do you do it?
Many managers get uncomfortable with enforcing consequences because they don’t know what the appropriate “punishment” should be. When someone does something wrong, what do you do?
Do you fire someone for missing a deadline?
Do you fire someone for being late to a meeting?
Have the difficult conversation
You don’t need to fire people every time something goes wrong. But you do need to address it. Don’t just accept this behavior.
I see leaders think, “Well this isn’t enough of a problem to fire the person…”, but because they are not comfortable having a difficult conversation, they do nothing.
You may not need to fire the person, but you do need to confront the poor behavior.
Examples:
Late to the meeting:
What part of “this meeting starts at 8am” did you not understand? This meeting starts at 8am and I expect you to be here at 8am. It’s 8:04. What makes you think it’s OK for you to be late?
Believe me, you only need to say this one or maybe two times, everyone in the room will be cringing, and no one in the room will want to hear it again. Your meetings will start on time.
(You need to be on time too.) Leaders who want their team to deliver on time, but don’t show up for their own meetings on time are sending a mixed message about the importance of commitments, and the standards of execution they find acceptable.
Missed deadline:
Acknowlege it.
This is unacceptable. You did not deliver. What happened? Do you realize the downstream problems this causes? What is your proposal to recover? How do you propose we now get this finished AND address the customer/sales/market issue this has created? How will you ensure this does not happen again?
Improve habits
Next time the person will try harder. The quality of execution will improve.
If you don’t do this, missed deadlines become a habit, and personal motivation to deiver on time will decline.
Will you become a tyrant?
I have had managers that were tough with consequences, and I have had managers that were bullies. These are completely different things.
You do not need to worry about becoming a bad person by calling out poor performance.
As long as you put the business outcome as the motivation for the conversation, and at the center of the conversation, you are not attacking the person as a bully would.
As long as you can ask yourself, “Is this conversation moving the business forward?” you are on high ground.
You can be kind to people and tough on results.
Move the business forward
Avoiding the conversation does not move the business forward.
Having the conversation does move the business forward.
Most likely your choice to NOT enforce consequences is creating bad habits, reducing motivation, degrading trust, and generally slowing you down.
A good general manager will realize that addressing missed deadlines and failures will build and organization that:
1. Builds trust, especially with high performers
2. Can learn from its mistakes
3. Will deliver on time, more predictably
4. Develops higher performing individuals
5. Creates products and services that hit market needs better and sooner
As a general manager, as in every leadership role, your job is to ensure that your team not only delivers, but that they become more capable over time.
Enforcing consequences and having the difficult conversations is an important tool to accomplish both.
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Today I want to address a topic on process. But I want to re-label the word process to be “make sure to get stuff done”.
I am never a fan of process for process sake, but I am a big fan of taking the chaos and drama out of executing.
Set a High Standard of Execution
As a General Manager you have to set a high standard of execution.
That means you personally need to do what you say you will do, like be on time for meetings, make clear assignments with owners and deadlines, and then…
When something does not happen on schedule, enforce consequences.
If you say, “Oh well, we didn’t make it, so just keep going till you finish”, you are setting a sloppy standard of execution and you are not delivering on your commitments.
Today I am going to talk about the the getting things done part.
I will cover enforcing consequences in a future article in this series.
How I narrowly escaped disaster
I want to start with a personal story about this.
When I got my first big job, managing a group of more than 150 people with multiple layers of management beneath me, I did not have experience getting things done leading an organization of this size.
Enter the hero of our story…
When I first met with my direct staff individually, one man came into my office and said, “I am your process manager”.
What I said to him is one of the things in my whole career I am least proud of and most embarrassed by… I did not have the leadership maturity to recognize what an awful thing this was to say to someone who works for you, when you meet them for the first time.
I said, “Wow, I never had a full time process manager before”. <yes, cringe>
So let’s just fast forward past the part where he assumed he was getting fired, to where I recognized that he was saving my job.
The gap between assigning and doing
Here is what I mean…
I am really good at translating high level strategy into super-clear actions with owners and measures. I see the big picture, I see the opportunity for how to win, I see what is in the way, and I can prioritize the right concrete tasks that will ensure we make strategic progress.
So imagine the staff meeting where we do this…
Everyone is clear about what we need to do and why. We have made assignments. And we have a schedule with measures and deadlines. Commence back-patting…
But then…
Everyone leaves the room and goes back to work.
All the new stuff is sitting on top of a workload that is already consuming all the time.
Because the assignments are so clear and committed, I assume the new work is being worked on. But it is actually at pretty high risk.
Too busy to do new things
The inertia in an organization to keep doing the current work is very high. The resistance individuals need to break through to plan for, and prioritize the new work, is also very high. This is where it all stalls.
This is where my process manager saved the day.
Tireless execution support
Capture: He would sit in those staff meetings and take all the notes about what was decided and committed and he would write it up, distribute it, AND turn it into a project plan with dependencies and timelines.
Daily Follow up: Then he would go around to every task owner, every week and say, how are you doing on this? He would exert regular, personal, visibility and pressure on what was committed.
Reporting: Then he would create a report and bring it into our staff meeting every week and let us know what was getting done on schedule and what (and who) was slipping.
With that “process”, he enabled me to make sure we all got done what we committed to. He made it easy for me to enforce consequences for being late (another key element of being a good general manager), because what was supposed to happen was spelled out so clearly.
This was invaluable. Without this process, would have failed to get stuff done on time. There is no question in my mind about this.
I really can’t emphasize this enough…
As the leader, I was feeling pretty good about my strategic thinking, and my ability to translate the high level goals into specific, concrete actions to get there.
But as the leader, I was also too busy with strategy, financial planning, communications, customers, traveling to multiple sites, and general corporate stuff, to be the one to personally go around and get updates from everyone, and create reports to track it all.
I can say without a doubt, without my process manager, I would have failed.
I would have failed to deliver, so I would have failed in my job. I would have failed to advance.
Happily ever after
But if nothing else, I am a fast learner. And I know how to get help.
So forever after, in every other executive role I stepped into, I made sure that there was someone on my team who had the natural strengths, skills, and energy to do this process work, to keep the trains running.
As the leader I made the strategy, goals, tasks and measures clear, and this person would do the daily, detailed, relentless work to make sure we executed.
Having a strong partner with me on execution made sure that my organizations always delivered what we committed to. The role was not always called “process manager”. For example one time it was my finance partner, and another, my chief of staff.
Hire your hero
Have this person report directly to you, and give them a lot of power.
This is not a low level administrative job. It needs to be someone who understands the business and someone who can understand the pressure you are under personally. They need to be able to enforce priorities when you are running out of time and you are not there.
It needs to be someone who can influence the people on your team who need to do the work, to do the work.
And even if you can convince a highly capable person not to report to you, it doesn’t work to have this role report into any one function because then the conversation about priorities is skewed. You have the proverbial fox guarding the hen house. The person loses credibility with the other functions, so you don’t get as much stuff done.
Delivering on time gives you huge competitive advantage in the market. You can be more responsive, more innovative, and win and keep more customers.
Don’t put on-time execution at risk. It’s too important. Get help!
So to add to our list of who you need help from:
1. Don’t try to be a GM without a mentor or a coach
2. Don’t try to be a GM without someone to help you track and measure execution.
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Summer is a great time to check in on your goals — to make sure you are making the professional progress you want.
If you have been thinking about becoming a member of Azzarello Group to get actionable ideas and guidance to optimize your career, now is a great time to join.
Join by June 30 and get 3 months Free
Your membership will be active through September of 2011. (That’s 2 summers!)
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This program is a remarkably good deal. The quality of the content is unmatched.
See what you get
Plus you get personal access to Patty in monthly member Coaching Hour conference calls, where you can get coaching on any business or career topic.
I really do want to help.
So make sure get the extended deal, don’t wait. Join now.
One of the CEO’s I am working with on a business transformation said to me about his managers,
“No, he won’t actually help solve the problem, he is more of a reporter.”
Ouch!
Think about your behaviors.
Are you at any risk of being a reporter?
Do you often highlight things that aren’t working?
Do you study things and point out what is wrong?
Do you regularly play devil’s advocate?
Oops!
What adds value?
I always talk about the importance of adding value to the business.
When it comes to reporting trouble, many people confuse what adding value actually means. They think that identifying and exposing problems is adding value. Or that doing analysis and providing insightful commentary about what is broken is adding value.
It is not.
So, you may be thinking…but you have to identify problems if you want to solve them. Or you need to know about issues if you want to fix them. Surely the person who raises these issues is adding value because the business “needs to know”.
Talking vs. Doing
The big, BIG difference for adding value is between talking and doing.
It is the difference between describing the current state or moving something forward. …Between exposing a problem and fixing it, or at least proposing a solution.
Do you have reporters on your team?
You can find them — talking.
Sounding smart, playing devils advocate. Raising important issues. Figuring out what is wrong. Telling people about it.
Do you have solvers on your team?
The solvers are the ones that show up and say, nervously, “I hope it’s OK, but I did this.”
Or, “I found this nasty issue, but here is what I have done to resolve part of it. Can I get your thoughts on these two options to fix the rest of it?”
When solvers run into an impossible problem they say to themselves, “Man this is screwed up, what is the first thing I am going to fix? What will I propose that will move us forward?”
The reporter is the one that gets to “Man, this is screwed up”, and thinks “I have to come up with the most compelling way to communicate how big of a problem this is so that people will get sufficiently worried about it, and I will get credit for exposing it.”
Reporting vs. Solving – the behaviors
Example: An organization that is chronically late delivering.
The reporter might analyze root causes and talk about lack of definition, poor test plans, poor communication, lack of accountability. All may indeed be real issues, but the reporter will expect someone else to lead and to act.
The solver will think through what actions might actually help. Even if it won’t solve the whole problem, they will endeavor to at least move something forward.
In the case of something like chronic late delivery a solver might say, “I am going to create a sign-off document that defines what finished looks like. This will help all of us clarify what specific actions must be completed to reach the deadline. It might not solve the whole problem, but it will make things better and we will learn something by doing it.
Another example: Sell higher
If an organization is not selling strategically enough, a reporter might present information about background and revenue and current sales skills, and recommend kicking off further study.
A solver will find someone in another organization inside or outside the company who is an expert and learn from them. They will experiment. They will try a new sales process. They will tune it until they hit on what succeeds. They will propose specific changes to share the learning.
What is your proposal?
You want to send a clear message that being a reporter is not good enough.
In every organization I have ever led or consulted with, I have found that merely responding to every single news report with the question, “What is your proposal?” goes a long way to solving this. Consistently doing this changes the culture and separates the solvers from the reporters.
The people who come back with a proposal will rise in the organization. Next time and forever after, they will start with a proposal.
The people who get annoyed by this and say things like, “I just thought it was important to make you aware of this”, (by the way, even typing this makes me cringe – I can still picture the specific people who regularly said this to me). These people will never be significant contributors to the success of the business.
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These labels help timid people raise issues when it’s helpful (Debate Phase) and then keep everyone focused on execution vs. talking more, when it is time to go. (Go Phase).
I got some questions about what to do when people undermine Go Phase with passive aggressive behaviors, when they continue to debate behind the scenes, expecting or trying to get the Debate Phase to re-open.
Let people know you are serious
The basic remedy here is that you need to let people know you are serious about the new work in GO phase.
The natural habit of an organization is not to change.
People will always go back to what they were doing before if you are not explicit about making the change stick.
Behaviors don’t change for 2 key reasons
1. Dissenters. Passive aggressive people really don’t agree, and they are trying to do something different on purpose.
2. Reality strikes back. People with the right intentions cave when the reactive pressures of the day re-assert themselves, and they get nervous about doing something different or strategic.
As soon as the first person jumps ship and goes back to the old way of doing things, then others will think, “oh I guess we are not doing this new thing any more and I better get back to reacting to the emergencies like before, because that is what is valued. I believe this to be true because I can see people acting the old way, and I haven’t heard about the new thing in awhile”.
I recommend these strategies to my clients to avoid 3 common failures to predictable, on-time execution and to make change stick.
1. Track Progress Better
Have someone help you track progress.
Do you find yourself communicating strategy, assigning work and owners, and then absolutely hating doing the follow-up to keep checking in with everyone to see if things are on track? Or just being too busy with customers and other things to do a good job at this. When I was a CEO and GM, I know I struggled.
I was lucky early in my career to have someone on my team who was great at this. I assigned the work. He wrote it all down, he made sure I didn’t fail to assign specific owners or dates. Then he relentlessly followed up with everyone involved, and created tracking reports for how we were doing on finishing the things we committed to.
If you are not doing a good job tracking progress you will fail to execute.
If you are not good at this yourself, get someone on your staff to do this for you, or you will never get the important things done. I had a person on my staff to do this for me for the next 15 years of my career once I learned this lesson. I would have failed without it.
2. Communicate More
Have someone help you communicate.
Once you make your decisions and you are in GO phase, communicate a lot. Communicate more than you ever thought you could. Get bored to death with your message.
Talk about key initiatives in every communication, in every meeting, in every 1-1 discussion. Make sure that when people see you coming, they know you are going to want to hear about the key initiatives that are in GO phase.
If you are not communicating regularly, you will fail to execute.
If you are not in the habit of communicating regularly, or other things keep you too busy to focus on it, get someone to help you do this.
Have them put you on a schedule for email and group meetings.
Have them write up a straw-man of the communication. Have it include milestones and great examples of how people supported the new strategy, and questions for you to answer about what people are confused or concerned about.
Don’t ever go more than 1-month without revisiting and communicating your progress on key initiatives with everyone involved.
3. Set a good example
Don’t let sloppy behaviors get in the way
I have seen leaders who say they are serious about execution, that it’s the most important thing to them, but then they are late to their own staff meetings. Or they let missed deadlines come an go and never mention it or deal with it.
If you want your organization to be good at executing, you to set a good example for the quality of execution you expect with your own behaviors. And you need to hold people accountable when things don’t get done.
If you have people helping you track and communicate, it’s just a matter of your following through. (but you still have to be on time for meetings!)
What do you think?
What has delayed execution in your organization and what have you done about it?
Share your thoughts by leaving a comment!
If you want more ideas on leading better execution download my free report on leading change called “Too Busy to Scale”, or learn about the Strategy into ActionTM work I do with executive leadership teams .
I was working with a corporate client last week and we got into a conversation about developing their leaders.
The challenge:
How can we get more of our people thinking and executing on problems like a CEO would?
How do we get our leaders to step up to personally own bigger business problems and drive strategic opportunities, with less direction and involvement from the executives?
My favorite comment from the GM leading this organization was:
When there is a crisis or a big opportunity that is not well defined and needs a leader, I want to be able to tap someone to go in, and say to them…
“Here is a flashlight and a power bar, go make it happen.”
This discussion triggered an important point in my mind, and reminded me of great story that I wanted to share.
Who can step up?
The point is – when you are looking for people to step up, don’t just look to the next level of leadership. Look broadly.
You have people in your organization that have the motivation and the will to move mountains for you if you trust them and give them the chance.
The story:
When I was a general manager running a billion dollar software business, one day my assistant casually shared this story with me about something that had happened during one of my trips.
Scene 1: an angry customer calls…
While you were in Asia, a big executive from [a large telco customer] called and wanted to talk to you. I told him you were traveling in Asia, and asked if I could help him. He said, no, I need to talk to Patty.
Ownership of the problem
I heard him tapping his pen on his desk and I could sense he was stressed so I asked him, it sounds like you are upset about something. Why don’t you tell me what is happening, and then I can make sure it gets to Patty right away.
Then he started to talk. He told me he needed to talk with you because he was having [a catastrophic problem with our product].
I listened, and then assured him I would let you know soon as you landed, and I’d have you get right back to him.
As he explained the probem, although I didn’t understand all the details, I knew that it should either go to the VP of products or the VP or services to get solved.
Ownership of the action
So I called them both of them. The Product VP said that he would take the problem. I gave him the customer’s info and asked him to call the customer right away. And I asked him to call me back afterward to confim he had made contact with the customer and that the problem was being worked on.
Then I called the customer back, and told him, I just talked to Patty, and she understands your issue, and she has has assigned our VP of products to work with you to solve your problem. I have personally confirmed this with him.
I will call you back tomorrow to confirm that you are satisfied with the action being taken, and so I can report back to Patty what is happening, so she can stay on top of this.
(scene cut’s to Patty in a taxi in Korea, oblivious to this problem stuck in traffic jam…)
My assistant continues with the customer…Here is my direct phone number. Please call me if you have any questions or concerns.
Ownership of the outcome
She goes on to say, then I called him back the next day, AND the day after that, to make sure that things were progressing.
On the third day, I told him you were going to be back from Asia and asked him if he would like to schedule a call with you.
He told me that wasn’t necessary, and make sure to thank Patty for taking care of this while traveling.
Remarkable, don’t you think?
I can’t emphasize enough that my assistant was telling me this in a similar tone to, I have let corporate know that we have adhered to the new policy of stapling the old forms together before mailing them.
In fact it was a couple of months after I returned that she told me this, and I had to drag it out of her that she had resolved customer crises in my absence several times.
She had natural strengths to empathize with people, take action, and own outcomes. She did not think she was doing something exceptional.
I learned a lot from her about owning problems and taking action from that one story.
Getting your leaders to step up
Much of my work today is about helping leaders feel more confident and capable to step up to deal with ambiguity, take action, face challenges and take personal ownership of the outcome.
There are two sides to this.
1. You have to delegate and trust people to make things happen.
2. People need to recognize that they have the permission to be the driver in a situation, and the imagination and guts to create solutions.
You need to let them practice making decisions if you want them to step up.
Owning the outcome
There are many other supporting skills and communications necessary to enable this, but it all starts with a shared expectation that you are supposed to step up and take ownership for the outcome of a situation.
How do you find and motivate these people to take on big, ugly problems?
Look for people who aspire to be general managers. You won’t need to motivate them to take on extra work.
They will be self motivated because they will recognize you are giving them a special opportunity — a task that lets them skip levels in the organization, and gets them experience and exposure which will be a big deal in advancing their career.
As we start 2011, It’s a good time to step back and think about what you want to be true when you start 2012.
Work vs. Growth
If you don’t set some goals, you’ll deliver a bunch of work (which is good) but you’ll be starting 2012 in the same shape you are in now (which is not good enough).
What I mean is that you and your team will not have grown.
You will have delivered more stuff, but have only the same capabilities and capacity as you do now.
Two things about effective leadership
1. As a leader you must deliver stuff AND get better at what you do over time.
2. It is a primary job of a leader to build a team beneath you that is highly capable, so that you free yourself up to solve higher order problems.
If your team does not get more capable, you all get stuck, and the business gets stuck in the same place.
How will you grow yourself, your business and your team?
What do you want to be better this time next year?
Here are three questions you should be answering in right now.
It’s Jan 2012…
1. How will YOU be better or more capable?
Is your network stronger?
Have your communication skills improved?
Do you have a new mentor?
Have you mastered something that the people at the top of your field are doing or thinking about?
Have you got your ideas into the world more broadly/publicly?
Have you become a better mentor to someone?
Are you more fit?
Have you been a better member of your family?
.
I’m not at all suggesting you try and do all of these things, or that these are even the right list of things for you to choose from.
But think about it…In what way do YOU want to be better next year? Decide. Do something on purpose.
Hint: start by scheduling some time to think about this!
It’s Jan 2012…
2. What will your team be capable of, that they are not today?
Will you team be better at…
Making decisions
A Quality improvement process
Managing the backlog of requested work
Communicating more effectively with peer organizations
Dealing with ambiguity
Recognizing and developing talent
On-time delivery
Managing expectations with stakeholders
Building credibility with an adversarial organization
Engaging and understanding customers
Internal or external use of social media
Communicating with employees
Selling more strategically
Business Plans with partners
Customer Service
.
This is a wonderful exercise to kick off the year with your team.
Have an off-site and decide not only what you want to get done, but what you want your team to be known for externally and internally, and what you want to be better at as team next year.
It’s Jan 2012…
3. What major things in your business will be fixed or invented?
Every business and every organization has persistent problems that are critical to get fixed, but don’t seem to ever get fixed. (You’re not alone.)
List your persistent issues. Face them head on.
What did you want to get done and didn’t. Why not?
List your unanswered questions.
What are the big debates and disagreements in your business and team?
What are the most biggest competitive threats that you have trouble addressing?
What are you most frustrating execution issues?
What systems and skills are your missing?
What parts of your organization are not working right?
.
It’s a very productive and valuable effort, to face your most annoying business issues, and decide to solve just one, once and for all. Then pick the next and solve that one.
It’s not just the work…
You need to be really diligent about not getting consumed by only delivering work.
You need to carve out time and energy to rise above the work and improve your game. That is the job of a leader.
If you do focus on work plus capability, the business benefits, the customers benefit, and everyone gets a little happier – including you!
THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW
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We are doing a formal marketing launch to the general public in January, but for friends of Azzarello Group, I wanted to let you know early for two reasons.
1. Many of you wanted to get the book for your team for Christmas. (We just made it, whew!)
2. I wanted to give you an early look, and an opportunity to join in the launch. Here’s how…
A New Book Blog
I’ve created a new book blog (early stage, sneak-peek) where a community of thought leaders will contribute ideas and resources on Business Leadership and Personal Development.
There are already some really cool links and my top book recommendations on the RESOURCES page.
Among the early posts will be some of my favorite classics like Bob Sutton’s Bullshit Bingo, and Margaret Heffernan’s, 10 Signs of Incompetent Managers.
There will be regular guest bloggers who are highly regarded experts in this space as well.
Please join the discussion!
I hope you will contribute as well. There are many important ideas in the book like how to:
Be more effective, more strategic, a better leader, a better communicator, and a better networker.
Increase your value to your company and advance your career.
Fit your work into your life, so your life gets better.
Contribute your content
Contribute a review of the book. Or write an article on one of the topics in the book. You can also contribute links to great related resources, blogs and websites you have found.
You’ll be getting exposure for your ideas and connecting with a community of like-minded people.
Many of you talk about expanding your professional network. Here’s a great place to do it!
2. Write a review or article – Feel free to include links to your business or service so we can all find you.
3. Send your article to me at rise@azzarellogroup.com
4. We will post your article on the blog
5. You can also post your ideas and links directly in the comment section of the blog posts. (Right now there is only one post, but feel free to comment there and get us rolling.)
Thanks so much!
Patty
PS. Contact me directly for volume orders of the book.
Here are some of the early review comments you’ll find on Amazon
In “Rise,” Patty Azzarello has done what no other successful executive before her has: analyzed, codified and recorded the steps and techniques required to achieve success in, and more importantly, to gain more fulfillment from one’s career.
This is real-world stuff. The book talks about the whole chain of how you get your first management job and takes you all the way through to managing, in her case, a billion dollar global business. Like she says in the section ‘Executive Confessions – “It’s OK to be scared. It’s not OK to get paralyzed by it.”
I read a lot of business/career books and they typically have 3 or 4 insights that I can take from them and use in my day job. I stopped folding pages back and highlighting passages in RISE because just about every page had a mark or a bent page..
My first book signing at the Fanzilli/Bauer dinner in New York City, Dec 7, 2010
I had a mentor teach me that that business success was based on these three things in this order. People, Process, Profit.
Do things on purpose
From decades of watching successful business leaders, lessons learned from my own experience as a GM and CEO, and my work with business leaders today, I know that focused, proactive attention in these areas can help you reduce risk and go faster.
And… leaving them to chance can stall your growth.
1. People: Respect People
If you can motivate a talented group people to personally care about growing your business, you have won a big part of the game.
Common misstep:Seeing and treating people as interchangeable resources, instead of as talented, creative partners and contributors in your business growth.
Develop your people and your team. Hire the smartest people you can find, and encourage and support everyone to develop – at all levels. Trust people to take on big things, fail sometimes and learn. Always be building capacity so your team can do more next year than the did this year. See people development as having a hard ROI.
Communicate a lot. Have a bias toward openness, not secrecy. Make people feel included and informed – all the time. Tell the truth. When you can’t share everything don’t stop talking. Share what you can.
Say thank you. Creating a culture of recognition is a very powerful thing. Make sure you have ways of knowing when good things happen, and personally thank people. Make recognition and appreciation a process and a habit.
Manage performance. Do great things for your top performers and have consequences for your low performers. You can’t hide your reluctance to deal with poor performers. Everyone sees it, and it degrades trust and respect.
Acknowledge peoples’ lives outside of work. Invite them to bring their whole self to work, and don’t make their life outside of work need to be in so much competition. A great example of this I heard recently from Stan Slap is to put all of your team’s major personal events and commitments on the work calendar or project plan, so that the whole team can see it, and do their best to plan and work around them. Wish I thought of that 20 years ago!
2. Process: Get stuff DONE
Execute well. Manage and finish the important things.
Common Misstep: I am surprised at how many organizations regularly tolerate not getting done, the things they say they want to do.
Deliver on time. If you are not delivering on time. Fix it. No business can scale if you don’t have the fundamental ability to deliver what you say you will. And people love to get stuff done.
Just enough process. Judge the right amount of process for the size and state of your company. Too much process can stall a fast growth start-up, but not enough will keep a mid-size company from being able to grow, and meet commitments. Decide the right amount, (it’s not none). Put it in place and prioritize it. Make the adherence to the process that supports critical outcomes a higher priority than the work. It’s the only way to mature behaviors and get there. (And you are investing in building even more capacity for the future.)
Measure the most important things and improve. Make sure you are measuring the things that truly matter. What are the key drivers in your business? What makes your business happen? What are the three things that need to happen before someone buys? How do you know that enough of those things are happening?
Make room for strategic thinking and actions. Don’t be so busy with your current business that you fail to make time to work on your bigger, future business. You need to carve out time, people and budget to make sure you are not forgetting to grow your business while taking care of your current revenue stream.
3. Profit: Stay connected to reality
Always be clear about the external perceptions and financial performance of the business.
Common misstep: Tactical activity and wishful thinking can obscure the harsh realities of how well your business is really doing.
Everyone knows how we make money. It is vitally important that every individual knows how the company makes money. What product lines and geographies does the revenue come from? Which of those are the most profitable? What are the fixed and variable costs? Every person should know their role in both the income and expense picture.
External Input, Validation and Measures: Always make sure you are getting the truth from customers, and make sure enough of your measures are externally driven. Don’t congratulate your self too much for delivering beautiful products and offers on time, that the customers don’t find valuable.
Know what’s (really) going on. Come out of your corner office and spend time in the trenches. Kind of like the TV Show, Undercover Boss, but without the disguise. Spend time with the front line workers, see what they are doing and how they are thinking about the business. You will learn more real, valuable information than you can ever learn from your chain of command. It’s not that your managers keep secrets, it just that the information doesn’t boil up with as much clarity and richness as you will learn from getting personally involved.
Sell something. Be acutely tuned to what is selling. How can you improve, accelerate or make the sales process more compelling, effective and efficient? Go on sales calls. Try and sell your products personally. Know what works and what flops. Find and deal with obstacles to the sales process. Know inside and out how your company finds, develops and closes business.
People who are personally motivated, working within a well managed environment that enables them to finish and deliver things, with clear financial accountability will create a profitable growing business. People, Process, Profit.
3 Aspects to Successful Business Leadership.
I had a mentor once that taught me that that business success was based on three things in this order. People, Process, Profit.
As I work with more business leaders, I have been thinking about these things more explicitly.
These things mean very specific things to me and how I lead. This comes from watching the most successful business leaders and how they do it, and my own experience about what helps you go faster and what slows you down.
I encourage you to think about how you lead. What is your approach to leading your business? What matters to you.
Share it with your team.
Here’s mine.
1. People: Respect people’s humanity
I choose to motivate people to want to work for me, vs. rely only on money.
Develop your people and your team. Hire the smartest people you can find, and encourage and support everyone to develop themselves. Trust people to take on big things, fail sometimes and learn. Always be building capacity so your team can do more next year than the did this year.
Communicate a lot. Have a bias toward openness. Secrecy is a bad thing. Make people feel included and informed – all the time. Tell the truth. When you can’t share everything don’t stop talking. Share what you can.
Say thank you. Creating a culture of recognition is a very powerful thing. Make sure you have ways of knowing when good things happen, and personally thank people. Make recognition and appreciation a process and a habit.
Manage performance. Do great things for your top performers and have consequences for your low performers. You can’t hide your reluctance to deal with poor performers. Everyone sees it, and it de-motivate high performers.
Be respectful of people’s lives outside of work. Invite them to bring their whole self to work, and don’t make their life outside of work need to be so much of a competition. A great example of this I heard recently from Stan Slap is to put all of your teams major personal events and commitments on the work calendar, so that the whole team can see them and do their best to plan and work around them. Wish I thought of that!
2. Process: Get stuff DONE
I am surprised at how many organizations I see that tolerate not getting done the things they say they want to do.
Deliver on time – If you are not delivering on time. Fix it. No business can scale if you don’t have the fundamental ability to deliver what you say you will. And people love to get stuff done.
Just enough process – Judge the right amount of process for the size and state of your company. Too much process can stall a fast growth start-up, but not enough will keep you from being able to grow, and meet commitments. Decide the right amount, put it in place and prioritize it.
Measure the important things and improve. Make sure you are measuring the things that truly matter. What are the key drivers in your business? What makes business happen? How do you know that enough of those things are happening?
Make room for strategic thinking and actions. Don’t be so busy with your current business that you fail to make time to work on your bigger future business. You need to carve off time, people and budget to make sure you are not forgetting to grow your business vs. take care of your current revenue stream.
3. Profit: Stay connected to reality
You can get pretty confused about what business you are in if you spend too much time in your office with your close colleagues.
Everyone knows how we make money. I think it is vitally important that every individual knows how the company makes money. What product lines and geographies does the revenue come from, which of those are the most profitibale. What are the fixed and vaiable costs. Every person should know their role in both the income and expense picture.
External Input, Validation and Measures: Always make sure you are getting the truth from customers, and make sure enough of your measures are externally driven. Don’t congratulate your self too much for delivering beautify products and offers on time, that the customers don’t find valuable.
Know what’s (really) going on. Come out of your corner office and spend time in the trenches. Kind of like the TV Show, under-cover boss, but without the disguise. Spend time with the front line workers, see what they are doing and how they are thinking about the business. You will learn more real, valuable information than you can ever learn from your chain of command. It’s not that they keep secrets, it just doesn’t boil up with all the richness you will learn from getting personally involved.
Nothing happens till someone sells something. Be acutely tuned to what is selling and how to improve, accelerate or make the sales process more effective and efficient. Go on sales calls. Know what works and what flops.
People who are personally motivated, working within a well managed environment that enables them to finish and deliver things, with clear financial accountability will create a profitable growing business.
I was working with a corporate client last week and we got into a conversation about developing their leaders.
My first book signing at the Fanzilli/Bauer dinner in New York City, Dec 7, 2010
People, Process, and Profit