Insights · 2019
When strategy meets Monday morning
Fine strategies are worth nothing in practice when Monday morning arrives, unless real organisational execution capability has also been established. Plans do not execute themselves.
We see the same pattern again and again: the strategy is thoroughly worked out, the material looks impressive, and the leadership team is in agreement in the room. Then three weeks pass, and day-to-day operations have swallowed the decisions. The analysis is rarely the problem. It is the capacity to act afterwards.
Organisational execution capability consists of two things that must be in place at the same time: decisiveness — someone actually choosing, even when it is uncomfortable — and the ability to execute, meaning that the choice becomes changed behaviour among those who do the work.
Why execution stalls
There are too many priorities, so everything is important and nothing is urgent. Responsibility is shared and therefore nobody’s. The strategy is written in a language operations do not use. And there is no fixed cadence for follow-up, so what gets asked about is still only last quarter’s figures.
Then there is resistance. Organisms exposed to attempts at instability automatically seek a new equilibrium. Resistance to change is not ill will — it is predictable, and so it can be planned for.
Execution capability can be trained
For many years we have trained leaders in decisiveness under pressure — among other things on three-day programmes with instructors from the Danish Armed Forces’ special units and incident commanders from the fire service. The purpose is not the experience. The purpose is for the leader to feel the difference between wanting to decide and deciding.
Participants put it more sharply than we can. One wrote after a programme: “I decided which prioritisation I would go with. Not everything was allowed to disturb me. I filtered out everything irrelevant and had 100% focus.” Another: “It is important to keep calm and your authority, and to be able to zoom out and get an overview of the whole situation — and if necessary zoom in again and give new instructions.”
Four questions for the leadership team
What are the three most important things in the coming quarter — and what do we stop doing to make room for them? Who alone owns each of them? What do we look at every fortnight to know whether it is moving? And what concretely happens when an agreement is not kept?
If the group cannot answer those four, the strategy is not ready for execution, however well it is described.
Written by Mads Cronquist. Originally published in Danish on cronquist.dk (2019) under the title “High Performance Team Ledelse” — here in an edited English version.