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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
Execution is the Strategy: How Leaders Achieve Maximum Results in Minimum Time
Berrett-Koehler: San Francisco, CA, 2014. 262 pages.
Strategic planning is so yesterday, but execution is always in style.
The Four Premises of Strategy
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2
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Interdependency
Strategy and tactics are part of the same overarching process, with an inherent
relationship.
Fluidity
Strategy must be more flexible in its tactics now than in the past.
Speed
Strategy must be executed more quickly than ever before to be effective.
Validity
Strategy must still be appropriate and strong, or none of the first three
premises matter.
Four Keys to Efficient Strategic Execution
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L = Leverage
2
E = Environment
Do you have the organizational atmosphere, practices, and culture that will allow
your employees to easily support your strategic priorities? If not, you have a
cultural/engagement issue.
3
4
A = Alignment
Do your team members’ daily activities move them toward accomplishment of the
organization’s ultimate goals? If not, you have a communication/productivity issue.
Do you have the right people and drivers in place to achieve your strategic priorities
– ones that allow you to execute your strategy when the rubber hits the road? If not,
you have a talent/resource issue.
D = Drive
Are your organization’s leaders, teams, and employees agile enough to move
quickly once the first three pieces of this list are in place? If not, you have a speed/
agility issue.
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
L
E
LEVERAGE
ENVIRONMENT
Leadership Role
Engineer: Build It
Leadership Role
Mechanic: Fix It
Development Opportunity
Talent/Resources
Development Opportunity
Culture/Engagement
A
D
Leadership Role
Conductor: Steer It
Leadership Role
Bulldozer: Knock It Down
Development Opportunity
Communication/Productivity
Development Opportunity
Speed/Agility
ALIGNMENT
DRIVE
To prepare you to fully utilize the value of this SUMS, please go to
www.ExecutionIsTheStrategy.com and complete a free online Execution Quotient (EQ)
Assessment. Doing so will provide insight into your current strategic execution process as you
prepare to read the rest of the summary.
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
1
LEVERAGE
An efficient organization is one that operates with leverage already in place:
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The Effort/Input Force = the leader (you)
The Lever/Beam = the worker (team)
The Fulcrum/Pivot = the enabler (tool or resource)
The Load/Object = your organization (what you’re trying to move with your strategy)
Input
Force
Load
Lever
Output
Force
Fulcrum
Fulcrum
Maximize Your Input Force
Utilize a helping HANDS approach to keep your team properly aligned:
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Handpick your people
Assign duties carefully
Nurture initiative and innovation
Don’t abdicate
Study the results
Control freaks in leadership positions crush creativity,
drive depression, and kill camaraderie.
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
Strengthen the Beam
It’s up to you to strengthen a team member’s ability to execute strategy in every way possible.
Keep these pointers in mind when improving your organizational “levers.”
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Look for and reward hard work over talent
Learn to recognize the difference between high performers and average workers at a glance
Mentor newbies to help them learn the ropes
Provide the training your team needs to execute more effectively
Maximizing strategic execution requires hardworking, flexible
people with a combination of talent and experience in the places
they can do the most good.
Improve the Fulcrum
To take full advantage of leveraging, not only do you strive to strengthen yourself and your team,
but you may also have to replace or reposition the fulcrum to maximize your output.
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Equip yourself and your team with the right hardware, software, and resources
Think beyond your desk
Develop new partnerships and seek alliances
Be careful about what you cut
The wise leader understands the power of the fulcrum
to get more leverage from your system.
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ENVIRONMENT
A productive, successful working environment depends on workplace culture. An organization’s
culture guides discretionary behavior, picking up where the employee handbook leaves off. It’s
defined by what happens when the senior leadership team leaves the room.
Shape the Culture
Culture is not a goal to be mandated; it’s the outcome of a collective set of behaviors and unwritten
ground rules you’ve inadvertently created or enabled over the years.
• Foster an environment of excellence
• Lay a foundation of accountability
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
• Incite a culture of action
• Punch through the bureaucratic mindset
• Encourage a collaborative atmosphere
Dedicate yourself to developing and rewarding desired behaviors, and let
those rules guide your team as they meet challenges head on.
Encourage Change Hardiness
What doesn’t grow either stagnates or rots. So, knowing that change is necessary, keep working
to better your team. If you can inspire the proper attitude about change, your team will react
positively when it occurs.
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Focus on the benefits
Reframe the challenge as an opportunity
Phase it in gradually
Test and tweak
Identify and motivate change leaders
Get out of the way
Celebrate improvement
Roll with change as it inevitably occurs.
Ensure Engaged, Empowered Employees
Increasing your ratio of engaged employees can be hard work. The task requires not only strength
but also flexibility and empathy. Factors that increase engagement include:
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Confidence in one’s ability to do the job
Access to training and career development
Opportunities for growth
Ongoing communication and feedback from leadership
A clear understanding of the organization’s goals
Relationships with team members
Trust in the organization and its integrity
If you can persuade team members to give you more of their
discretionary effort, productivity will skyrocket.
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
3
ALIGNMENT
Alignment means your strategic priorities and the day-to-day operations of your team are
synchronized. Their tactics are carrying out your strategies. Specifically, your team members need
to know:
• Why should they care?
• What is the goal?
• How do we get there?
Take Your Team on a Mission
Modern leaders partner and collaborate with their team members, outlining vision, facilitating
their work, and urging them on. Clarifying the decision-making process means the leader:
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Researches the variables
Never makes unwarranted assumptions
Sets a deadline for actions
Starts planning
Your team won’t care about anything more than their
paychecks unless you inspire them.
Plan for Goal Achievement
The practice of aligning your strategic focus with carefully designed organizational goals removes
bottlenecks, breaks down information silos, cuts redundancy, limits confusion, and maximizes
productivity. Tips like the following help sharpen your focus to laser keenness:
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Define your market position
Tightly define your mission and vision
Stay flexible
Align your goals
Manage performance
Monitor the metrics
People distrust the ambiguous – so be crystal clear about what your team
members should be accomplishing in their daily activities.
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
Measure Your Progress
With enough effort and the right tools, you can eventually build a voluntary culture of
accountability in which you don’t have to ride people to get them to do the right things at the right
times. To make sure your team keeps moving forward with an appropriate mix of strategy and
tactics, implement these four practices with your team:
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•
•
•
Communicate
Engage
Empower
Provide
Wise leaders possess a profound understanding of the difference between
strategy and tactics, knowing exactly what each involves.
4
DRIVE
As a leader, your greatest importance may lie in clearing the way forward for your team members.
This typically involves smoothing out the speed bumps and removing any obstacles that block
task execution, particularly the procedural ones.
Remove Obstacles from the Path
All teams include someone who makes things easier for others to do their jobs. In the white-collar
world, the team leader removes the obstacles, from crushing groupthink, to speeding up decision
making, to being a realist rather than a perfectionist. Here are four basic principles to accomplish
that task:
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Perfect your systems
Establish a broad support base
Eliminate myopia
Communicate effectively
Speedy decision-making requires agility, flexibility, and a careful eye
toward strategic alignment within your organization.
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
Add Enablers to the Equation
If you want your team members to maximize their productivity and ability to execute in the moment, make the process easier by facilitating their technology and methodologies. To get your
brain moving as quickly as it needs to, THINK faster:
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Take care of yourself
Hone your memory
Improve your focus
Nourish your brain
Knowledge = Power
Do your best to trim away anything that doesn’t contribute to your execution,
being careful about what you add to your team’s plate.
Eliminate Time Wasters
To survive in business these days, companies must become nimble enough to out-maneuver their
competitors, large and small. Here are some actions you and your team should NOT use to decide
what to do next:
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Based on what you feel like doing
By the order in which tasks appear
By who’s screaming the loudest
By what comes to mind
By the order of the sticky note
By questioning the right path to take
Shave wasted time out of your schedule and avoid the unnecessary.
Execution is the strategy that will allow you to remain relevant, innovative, and competitive in the
global marketplace of modern business.
Keep this in mind: Leaders should work with their people to build effective business strategies in
real time. You may not have time for strategic planning as such, but you should always make time
to build an organizational culture that’s adept at strategic execution.
By the time you finish reviewing the four keys, you’ll see that execution really is the strategy that
will propel your organization forward in today’s fast-paced arena.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher. From Execution is the Strategy, copyright© 2014
by Laura Stack, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA.
All rights reserved. www.bkconection.com
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Execution is the Strategy | Laura Stack
Recommended Resources
1.Read “8 Obstacles to Executing Your Church’s Strategy” by Auxano Founder Will Mancini.
2. Do you carry your organization’s strategy in the trunk? Read why Will Mancini thinks you should.
3.Review and download a wealth of extra resources from author Laura Stack, including a discussion
guide, sample chapter, and more.
4.Watch a presentation of Execution is the Strategy by author Laura Stack.
5.Take a free, online Execution Quotient Assessment to provide insight into your current strategic
execution process.
Amazon Links
Paperback link
Kindle link
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Go Ahead Actions for Vision Clarity
by Clint Grider, Ph.D., CFRE
William Shakespeare once mused: “This is the monstrosity in love, that the will is infinite and the
execution confined.” In Execution is the Strategy: How Leaders Achieve Maximum Results in Minimum
Time, author Laura Stack emboldens leaders to translate vision and strategy into performance.
Can love of (or infatuation with) a “vision” for the future actually obstruct a leader’s ability to properly
evaluate opportunities and threats? Can traditional models of strategic planning get in the way of an
organization’s capacity to foster nimble thought leadership among its team members? The author
suggests that the answer to both questions is yes if goals, strategy, tactics, and execution are not woven
together: “[They] should be part of the same dynamic process—implementing long-term priorities
through short-term, daily operations.”
Said a different way, in today’s dynamic world, Stack asserts that strategy cannot be separated
from execution—that strategy must emerge from on-the-ground execution. And yet, many leaders
inadvertently err by casting vision that is forged separately from those who are expected to “implement”
that vision. Such an approach, at best, handcuffs organizations from realizing their potential.
Leaders who are serious about long-term results intentionally foster a paradigm that directly connects
operational and strategic initiatives. Such agility maximizes the organization’s talent and builds a rich
culture of collaboration, innovation, and competitive advantage that stands the test of time.
How to Go Ahead
1) A
t your next team meeting, review the “Alignment” Execution Key as covered in this SUMS on
pages 7-8. For each of the assessment questions below, instruct your team to rate the question
from 1 (to no extent) to 5 (to a great extent).
• T
o what extent do I understand what motivates each team member to perform at a high level?
Do I understand that people contribute discretionary effort for different reasons?
• D
o I show genuine appreciation for hard work? Have I discovered what would be meaningful for
each person on the team?
• D
o I keep a clear picture of goals in front of our team? Do I continually communicate excitement
for our mission?
2) A
sk the team to respond again to the questions in that section again, this time substituting “we”
for “I”. Discuss the team’s viewpoints of the organization as a whole vs. individual leaders and
departments.
3) H
ave you identified a coach to help you improve your culture of execution? Do you need some
objective help to look at where you are and potential next steps? Call or email me for a free onehour assessment.
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More About Clint Grider
As a respected vision optimizer and leader of non-profit organizations for over
20 years, Clint Grider keenly identifies the key people and strengths at the core
of an organization’s culture. With this discernment and an encouraging spirit,
he guides leaders through vision clarity processes leading to meaningful
results and sustainable momentum. Clint has provided strategic leadership in
universities, medical research, global ministry, church, school, and corporate
settings. He helps organizations improve their systems and capacity in creative
and vital ways.
As a Certified Fund Raising Executive, Clint has served successful campaigns
ranging from $2 million to $637 million. Prior roles include: COO and vice
president of finance & development for America’s Family Coaches, Chief
Development Officer for Sky Ranch, Director of Development at Baylor College
of Medicine, Assistant Vice President and Chief Development Officer at Houston
Baptist University, and consultant to the President at the Texas A&M Foundation.
Clint received his bachelor’s in business administration and marketing from
Baylor University, master’s in educational psychology from Baylor, and Ph.D.
in educational administration and continuous process improvement from Texas
A&M University.
Clint and his wife Kindra have been married 23 years and live near Dallas, Texas
with their two daughters, where they attend and volunteer at The Village Church.
Email: [email protected]
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Auxano is the only vision clarity consulting group that will guide
your team through a God-ward and collaborative process called the
Vision Pathway. To learn more, visit auxano.com or check us out on
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