If you're driving toward Strategy Execution or Performance Excellence within your organization, you know how critical it is to get the executive team to be as passionate as you are about this effort. If you're having trouble building this enthusiasm among members of your senior management team, perhaps the following approach can assist you. I've seen it work wonders.
Once you've held a strategy session to develop your key strategic objectives for the coming year that will live on your scorecard, assign each top level objective to one of the executives on the senior team, making it clear that they will be responsible for identifying and managing the right measures, stretch targets, and cross-functional initiatives to achieve their objective across the organization.
They will be the “Executive Sponsor” for deploying and achieving that objective for the entire organization. Use an Objective Charter to help the executive identify the business case for the objective (why it is important and what problem it is addressing), the measures and targets, the potential initiatives, and the individuals who will lead the initiatives.
This process does several things – it gets them intimately involved in the most important objectives, it drives cross-silo activities, and it kick-starts the key activities that will drive breakthrough results and excitement in the organization. In my experience, breakthrough business results sustain organizational buy–in better than anything else I have seen.
The remaining factors that will drive the results are strong initiative planning for those initiatives aligned to the objective, data-driven analysis, and cross-functional business reviews of progress. Initiative planning is not usually a core competency in most organizations, with the possible exception of IT organizations. So, an initiative planning document, coupled with training and coaching on how to use it, plus ongoing reviews of progress is a must.
Next, the various initiative owners must use a structured problem solving process (almost always PDCA- based) to analyze the initiative “problems” and to develop the right solutions. Finally, alignment and analysis-based cross-functional monthly reviews must be executed by the Executive Sponsor to ensure that the following is occurring:
- Each initiative has identified outcome measures that have strong correlation to the objective measure.
- All of the initiatives in the aggregate will close the gap in the objective measure and thus, meet the annual scorecard target.
- All initiatives are owned, on schedule and on budget.
- All of the cross-silo activities that must occur for success are occurring.
I've seen this approach work first-hand. Leverage your executive team and make them Executive Sponsors of Top Level Objectives. You'll find that it will drive cross-silo activities, accountability, management buy-in and, most importantly, improved results.
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