Why You Need to Build an Execution Machine to Succeed

It’s in the self interest of many constituents to complicate how business should be successfully conducted.

There are finance experts who promulgate principles for having a healthy balance sheet; sales wizards who describe what an effective sales funnel looks like; inventory management specialists who define the level of product turnover required to drive optimum operating margins and leadership pundits who prescribe the fundamentals necessary to maximize employee engagement and loyalty.

Each discipline brings their own specific area of expertise to the table to help organizations enhance their performance, but how does leadership determine which specific tools are key to improvement?

It’s too complicated.

There are numerous moving parts involved in how an organization operates, and determining how each component part should be synchronized to optimize overall effectiveness is an extremely difficult challenge.

It’s like a golfer trying to improve their game. There are lessons in how to address the ball, grip the club; the backswing; the ball impact; shifting body weight; and the follow through (to mention only a few!). The golfer focuses on the grip and can’t assimilate the rest of the swing fundamentals; their game doesn’t improve to the level they expect. They are frustrated.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Business CAN be simplified; it can be boiled down to a single crucial focus that drives sustaining levels of remarkable performance.

Leaders should be building organizations to EXECUTE brilliantly; building execution as a core competency and applying it to ANY strategy they create. And if they do, they WILL outperform their peers and outpace their competitors.

Pay attention to these four execution fundamentals .

Loosen up on planning . THE most critical element of performance is how well the strategy is carried out. Yes, a “good” plan with a sensible direction is required but if execution falters the plan is worthless. An average plan brilliantly executed produces far better performance than what people might consider to be a “brilliant” strategy that can’t be satisfactorily executed.

So invest 80% of the time available on EXECUTION planning; 20% on STRATEGIC planning.

Lead by serving those in the trenches . Serving leadership cultures unleash individual executional effort and lead to unexpected and amazing results contrary to its “command and control” cousin.

“What can I do to help you?” is the question servant leaders pose to reduce grunge and eliminate internal barriers that prevent things from getting done.

Recruit people “lovers” . Transactions continue to happen when an employee invests honest emotional energy in taking care of a customer. Execution prowess demands that millions of mind blowing “moments of truth” occur seamlessly between an organization and its customers.

This happens ONLY when employees have the natural inbred desire to serve their fellow man.

And remember you can’t TRAIN people to love people; you can train ‘em to grin but that’s about it.

Stop selling; start serving . Flogging products and services tries to advance the organization’s agenda, not the customer’s. This one-sided dynamic may result in a single short term transaction but does nothing to create an annuity stream of revenue over the long haul.

Execution genius looks out to the horizon, so organizations need to be “mindless” about building and deepening rich customer relationships by serving THEM; marching to THEIR agenda; subordinating the interests of the BUSINESS to THEIR interests.

Keep it simple.

Build an execution machine first, THEN use the self interest constituents to fine tune it with the relevant micro stuff these experts love to pitch.