The Unvarnished Truth 2: What Executives Must Do to Drive Breakthrough Performance

In my last post on this topic (The Unvarnished Truth: Why Balanced Scorecards & Performance Management Efforts Fail), I talked about how there is often a single executive standing in the way of success when it comes to achieving strategic goals. I called this person the "Breakthrough Roadblock" (BR) and in this post I'll talk about what executives need to do if they want to facilitate, rather than be a roadblock for breakthrough performance.

Here are the six most critical things I think executives must do to assure that strategy execution and performance management efforts get results:

1. Communicate relentlessly – Executives should mention the effort in almost every interaction with groups of employees and even their direct subordinate. A one-shot “roll-out” meeting isn’t enough.
2. Be involved in the strategy development – if creating a top-level strategy map and scorecard are part of the effort, the top executive needs to be involved. The entire leadership team needs to be 100% behind the strategy outlined in the scorecard. Delegating creation of the responsibility is a huge, early sign that the effort is not important to the top executive.
3. Follow up – Breakthrough Roadblocks (BRs) often are involved in helping to get a strategy execution effort going, but then move on and let it wither and die. Enlightened Executives don’t have to work the project every day, but they ask for updates, help answer policy questions, and resolve organizational difficulties.
4. Kick butt—OK, so maybe that is not the approach in every organization to get naysayers on board. Sometimes it is convincing, encouraging, pleading, etc. But make no mistake; the Enlightened Executive makes sure his entire team is on board. BRs are fine with tepid statements of support or will let some Senior people not participate. The worst practice: build “capability” and let leaders “adopt” it as they see fit.
5. Ease the change – All change includes a "valley of despair." Whether you are using software or Excel to manage your metrics and scorecards, putting in place a closed loop management system based on strategic objectives and both leading and lagging measures is hard. It takes time and work. In my experience, in the end it saves work but people in the valley of despair are going to whine about the “extra” or “double-entry” work. The BR will offer them relief, push deadlines, or use their complaints to back away from the effort. The Enlightened Executive will keep everyone marching towards the same goal.
6. Walk the walk—In my view, the entire reason for embarking on a strategy execution effort is to get to a point where the entire organization is conducting regular, fact-based business reviews using the same line-of-questioning methodology to identify and address root causes. If the top executive is not conducting such reviews, why should anyone else?

What other executive leadership qualities have I missed?  I’d love to hear from you.

Comments

[jeff]

Thanks for the comment Patricia.

I agree that two way communication is important-- didn't mean to imply the opposite.

I think it is especially important for the implementation team to gather and consider all opinions (especially the naysayers!)

jeff

[Patricia]

In my opinion, you missed "engage others" --- esp. stakeholders who have content expertise or could block execution. "Communication," the way you wrote about it, sounds one-way from the executive to others. This is short-sighted.

Naysayers often have very good reasons for saying "nay" - their (valid) concerns need to be heard.

Think of BP and its strategy of cutting corners to cut costs.