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Lately I’ve been meeting with managers of many different kinds: top-managers, middle managers, CEO’s in SMO’s in different settings. When they tell me about their challenges they all struggle with employee performance. Some say that performance is not exactly poor but it could be much better. Some calls employees lazy and skill-wise inadequate. The middle managers biggest fear is that employees call in sick. When they do that the middle manager struggles with ensuring that his team is able to deliver as promised. Top managers talked about execution. Middle managers focused on delivery.
As I write this I travel back to my own time as a middle manager. Back then I faced the same challenges that I still hear about when I ask middle managers today. In my time as a middle manager my company grew from 800 to 4000. It was an adventure and it was also a challenge to make ends meet in day to day activities. I sometimes joked by comparing the company with a danish comedy figure ’Jeppe’ or ’Jeppe on the mountain’. Jeppe is an alcoholic who times and times again falls into drinking too much and is afraid to go home to his wife Pernille, ’cause she will beat him up. Jeppe pleads his legs: ”Oh legs of mine – why wont you carry me home. Please walk you legs of mine”. The fact is that the legs do not listen because they’re afraid of the outcome. It’s not compelling to them to go home and get beaten up. There is no connection between head and legs. And this is where I get to the word ’Execution’.
For some reason this word ’Execution’ has made me uncomfortable. Maybe it was when I came across it in slogans like ”It’s all about execution”, book titles like ”Execution without excuse” (I threw that one in the bin before I ever read it) or blogposts titled ”Get rid of people that don’t execute”. Don’t get me wrong. To me there is nothing more important than serving my clients on time and as promised. Nothing ever was more important. But it is as if there is some meaning that is not embraced by this word ’Execution’. I guess it has to do with the my experience of lack of connection between head and legs.
If you want execution to happen it is not enough to put your strategy on the intranet – or on the shelf in your executive office for the sake – and have managers download it and deal with it on their own. Strategy is not science and people make their own meaning of what they read. That meaning is hardly ever the same as what the group of people who created the strategy intended. You have to engage in conversations about how to accomplish what is in the strategy.
The word ’Execution’ implies that there are different phases in strategic work: a planning phase and an execution phase and that is problematic because an important part of the strategy work is done in the organization that is going to put one foot in front of the other to create the desired results. Of course you cannot have all 30.000 people in a large company participating in setting the overall direction for the strategic efforts but at some point strategy work should be considered far from accomplished until employee no. 29.999 has been invited to conversation about what strategy means to everyday activities and priorities.
Those leaders who complain about lack of execution actually very often hired the very same people they complain about. How can that be? Well one thing is that those leaders rely on the assumption that when they tell people what to do they will do it. Well it is not so. Employees identify with their leader. If they are not given proper training and feed back they will do what the leader does. If they are given proper training or feedback they will still copy the behavior of their leader…
As I was preparing for this blog post I took out the book ”Execution The Discipline of Getting Things Done” by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. Due to my resistance to the word ’Execution’ I have had it sitting on my shelf for half a lifetime without reading it but today I started sneaking around in it, and it got me interested. I found many interesting thoughts. But something hit me. The language. It’s all about machines and mechanics. Organizational hardware and software. The organization as a piece of mechanics. Something is missing.
’Execution The Discipline of Getting Things Done’ operates in the realm of discipline. When your personal steering system is discipline you live in the black-and-white world; a world of rewarding and punishing. It’s binary. It lacks all the nuances you need to be able to see simply because human beings are not black or white. They are everything in between. They are shaped by the organization they are part of. ’Execution The Discipline of Getting Things Done’ is all about focusing on the ’how’ and the ’what’ and the what of the organization. It misses out on the ’why’. Since human behaviour is very much directed by knowing ’why’ that is something you have to add to ’what’ and ’how’. When we touch upon ’why’ we touch the border of philosophizing. ’Execution The Discipline of Getting Things Done’ takes pride in not putting too much emphasis on philosophizing just as some other scholars that I recently met did. When we ignore philosophizing, we ignore to aware of what it means to be human. When we dare to ask the question ’why’ we stumble into the reflections upon what human beings consider to be the highest good.
Philosophizing is about being ’aware’ of what man is. Philosophizing is about consciously choosing what you see as ’purpose’ or ’the highest good’.
70% of all strategies fail. Maybe it’s fatal to ignore to include philosophizing when executing. What do you think?