Anyone can make pretty planning documents; transforming those plans into meaningful actions is the hard part. To transform the organization’s strategic objectives into action, an action plan is needed. In actuality, the planning details that comprises an action plan is a mini-project plan.
It is the systematic approach to initiating actions and the follow-up of those actions that closes the loop toward achieving the organization’s strategy.
Actions plans, sometimes referred to as operational or tactical plans, are typically short term accomplishable within one year.
Strong leadership, diligent management support and personal involvement are necessary to develop and deploy strategic plans into action. The hard part of the process is the deployment and management of the actions that will collectively, accomplish the organization’s strategic goals and objectives.
A key question is: Can time be made in the day-to-day activity schedule to integrate the work involved in carrying out the action plan? Or is just assumed that the time will somehow be found for these new actions and nothing will suffer? In this age, relatively few organizations have the slack time to assimilate a lot of new activities without sacrificing something.
The real enemy of strategy deployment (execution) is your day job! It’s the massive amount of energy that’s necessary just to keep your operation going on a day-to-day basis; and, ironically, it’s also the thing that makes it so hard to execute anything new. This robs from you the focus required to move your team forward.
Leaders seldom differentiate between the day-job pressure and strategic goals because both are necessary to the survival of the organization. However, they are clearly different, and more important, they compete relentlessly for time, resources, energy, and attention. We don’t have to tell you which will usually win this fight.
The day-job pressure is urgent and it acts on you and everyone working for you every minute of every day. The goals you’ve set for moving forward are important, but when urgency and importance clash, urgency will win every time. Once you become aware of this struggle, you will see it playing out everywhere, in any team that is trying to execute anything new.
The challenge is executing your most important goals in the midst of the urgent!
Executing in spite of the urgent means overcoming not only its powerful distraction, but also the inertia of “the way it’s always been done.” We’re not saying that the urgent or day-job is bad. It isn’t. It keeps your organization alive and you can’t ignore it.
If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow. In other words, if you and your team operate solely from within the urgent, you won’t progress-all your energy is spent just trying to stay upright in the wind.
The best approach to defeat the urgent is to focus your finest effort on the one or two goals that will make all the difference, instead of giving mediocre effort to dozens of goals. Execution starts with focus.
People who try to push many goals at once usually wind up doing a mediocre job on all of them. You can ignore the principle of focus, but it won’t ignore you.
However, the greatest challenge you face in narrowing your goals is simply that it requires you to say no to a lot of good ideas. What makes it even harder is that these good ideas aren’t presented all at once, wrapped in a nice little bundle so that choosing among them would be simple.
Instead, they filter in one at a time. Alone, each idea seems to make so much sense that it’s almost impossible for you to say no, so you fall into a trap of your own making.
Defining success must produce an understanding of your purpose, understanding your purpose must guide intention in everything everybody in the company (especially the managing executives) says and does. Only after success, purpose, and intention are defined can a meaningful strategy be built.
To be successful, that strategy, whatever it is, must contain the means of its execution. That is, execution is integral to a successful strategy. It follows that failed execution is failed strategy
At Agla Consult Ltd we have designed strategy execution framework that enables clients and their team to focus on their wildly important goals in the midst of raging pressure of day-to-day operations. It is the matter of focusing 20% of energy, resources and time to the important goals and leave 80% to the urgent.
0 Comments