Working Resources Blog

Leadership Secrets for Execution – Execution Is the Main Job

Are you working in an organization which values execution by leaders at all levels? Are the leaders in your organization relentlessly focused on achieving sustainable results?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “Are we honestly focusing on surfacing the realities of the business?” Extraordinary leaders execute and hold people accountable for results.

Are you focused on reality and getting things done? How effective are you at meshing your strategy with reality and aligning people with goals? Are you passionate about achieving goals at work that emotionally engage your people?

Execution Is the Main Job

The heart of execution lies in three core processes: the people process, the strategy process and the operations process. 

Leaders often bristle when they are told they have to run the three core processes themselves. “You’re telling me to micromanage my people, and I don’t do that.” Micromanaging is a big mistake because it diminishes people’s self-confidence, saps their initiative and stifles their ability to think for themselves.

But there’s an enormous difference between leading an organization and presiding over it. The leader who boasts of a hands-off style or puts faith in empowerment is not dealing with the issues of the day. He or she is not confronting the people responsible for poor performance, or searching for problems to solve and then making sure they get solved.

Leaders – at all levels – must become passionately engaged in the organization, recognizing that execution is their main job. Putting the right people in the right jobs and ensuring that rewards and recognition reinforce performance are essential.

According to Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy in their book Execution (2002), leaders must build and sustain a “social operating system,” involving continuous review meetings that make up the day-to-day execution management and that link performance and rewards. Review meetings provide the framework needed to create common ways of thinking, behaving and doing.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a leader who focuses on relentless execution. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Leadership Secrets for Execution – People, Strategy & Operations

Are you working in an organization which values execution by leaders at all levels? Are the leaders in your organization relentlessly focused on achieving significant results?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “Are we honestly surfacing the realities of the business?” Extraordinary leaders execute and hold people accountable for results.

Are you focused on reality and getting things done? How effective are you at meshing your strategy with reality and aligning people with goals? Are you passionate about achieving goals at work that emotionally engage your people?

3 Core Processes:

People, Strategy & Operations

The heart of execution lies in the three core processes: the people process, the strategy process and the operations process.  Every business uses these processes in one form or another. The three core processes of people, strategy and operations are familiar to practitioners of the Balanced Scorecard and the Strategy-Focused Organization management approaches.

In a study of winning companies that spanned more than ten years, professors William Joyce and Nitin Nohria found that there were four primary management practices that directly correlate with superior corporate performance, as measured by total return to shareholders. Winning companies achieve excellence in all four of these primary practices: execution, strategy, culture and structure (What Really Works, 2003).

However, more often than not, these three core processes stand apart from one another like silos. Typically, the CEO and his senior leadership team allot less than half a day each year to review the plans – people, strategy, and operations. Typically, too, the reviews are not particularly interactive. People sit passively and watch PowerPoint presentations.

They don’t debate, and as a result often they get few useful outcomes. People leave with no commitments to the action plans they’ve helped create. This is a formula for failure. What is needed is:
•  Robust dialogue to surface the realities of the business
•  Accountability for results – discussed openly and agreed to by those responsible for getting things done
•  Rewards for the best performers
•  Follow-through to ensure that progress tracks to the plans

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a leader known for relentless execution. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Creating an Execution Culture – A Leader’s Most Important Job

Are you working in an organization which values execution by leaders at all levels? Are the leaders in your organization relentlessly focused on achieving results?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “Which people will do the job– and how will they be judged and held accountable?” You need to deliver on your promises and hold people accountable to successfully achieve remarkable results.

Are you focused on reality and getting things through people? How effective are you at meshing strategy with reality, aligning people with goals, and achieving the results promised? Are you energized by achieving goals at work that emotionally fire up your people with meaning and purpose?

 “Execution is the great unaddressed issue in the business world today. Its absence is the single biggest obstacle to success and the cause of most of the disappointments that are mistakenly attributed to other causes.” ― Ram Charan, author of What the CEO Wants You to Know and Boards that Work.

Leaders make big promises… and then there are big gaps in what their organizations actually deliver. They have problems with accountability– people aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do.

Execution is not just something that does or doesn’t get done. Execution is a culture with specific set of behaviors and techniques that companies need to master in order to have competitive advantage.

Execution is not only the biggest issue facing business today, it is something nobody has explained satisfactorily. Execution is not just tactic – it is a discipline and a system. It has to be built into a company’s strategy, its goals, and its culture. And the leader of the organization must be deeply engaged in it.

“Many people regard execution as detail work that’s beneath the dignity of a business leader. That’s wrong … it’s a leader’s most important job.” ― Larry Bossidy, former chairman and CEO, Honeywell International

According to Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy in their book Execution (2002), a lack of focus on the discipline of execution is the main reason companies fall short on their promises. It explains the gap between what leaders want and what they deliver.

It is a system of getting things done through questioning, analysis and follow-through. It is a discipline for meshing strategy with reality, aligning people with goals, and achieving the results promised.

It should be a central part of a company’s strategy and goals and the most important job of any leader. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the business, its people, and its environment. An execution culture links the three core processes of any business – the people process, the strategy, and the operating plan – together to get things done on time.

The execution phase forces the leaders to translate the broad-brush conceptual understanding of the company’s strategy into an action plan for how it will all happen: who will do what in which sequence, how long those tasks will take, how much will they cost, and how they will affect subsequent activities.

Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing “what, how, and why”, of questioning, tenaciously following through, and of ensuring accountability. In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it. Most companies do not face reality very well. That is the basic reason they can’t execute.

Execution Questions

• Which people will do the job– and how will they be judged and held accountable?

• What human, technical, production and financial resources are needed to execute the strategy? 

• Will the organization have the resources it needs two years out, when the strategy goes to the next level?

• Does the strategy deliver the earnings required for success?

• Can it be broken down into doable initiatives?

People engaged in the processes argue these questions, search out reality and reach specific and practical conclusions. Everybody agrees about their responsibilities for getting things done, and everybody commits to those responsibilities.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more execution focused leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Generate New Ideas - Creating an Innovation Idea Factory

Are you working in an organization which values innovation by leaders at all levels? Are the leaders in your organization focused on purposeful work?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “Am I diligent, persistent, and committed to achieving extraordinary results?” You need to have faith in your own inventiveness and encourage the new ideas of others at work to successfully achieve remarkable results.

Are you open to creative thinking or typically critical of new ideas? How effective are you at encouraging the exploration of new ideas? Are you energized by creating a climate of innovation at work fueled by meaning, purpose, and a creative spirit?

Creating an Idea Factory: Lessons from Edison

Perhaps the greatest creation of Thomas Edison may have been his invention factory. His Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory was the world’s first R&D facility. He built it for the “rapid and cheap development of an invention” and delivered on his promise of “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” In six years of operation, it generated more than 400 patents.

Rather than focusing on one invention, one field of expertise, or one market, Edison created a setting that enabled his inventors to move easily in and out of separate pools of knowledge, to keep learning new ideas and to use old ideas in novel situations.

They used old ideas and materials in new ways. The phonograph blended elements from past work on telegraphs, telephones, and electric motors.

In 1820, H.C. Oersted, a Dane, discovered that a wire carrying an electric current was surrounded by a magnetic field. In 1825, W. Strugeon, an Englishman, wound a live wire around an iron bar and created an electromagnet. In 1859, H. van Helmholtz, a German, discovered he could make piano strings vibrate by singing to them. Later L. Scott, a Frenchman, attached a thin stick to a membrane; when he spoke to the membrane, the other end of the stick would trace a record of his voice sounds on a piece of smoked glass. Then, in 1874, a Scotsman from Canada, working in Cambridge MA, put these elements into one instrument. The instrument was the telephone and the man was Alexander Graham Bell. The only thing Bell contributed was a fresh synthesis; there was no new discovery.

In innovation there is talent, there is ingenuity, and there is knowledge. But in the end, innovation requires hard, focused and purposeful work. If diligence, persistence and commitment are lacking, then no amount of talent, ingenuity or knowledge will produce results.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and creativity, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to More Innovation– Seven Sources of New Ideas

Are you working in an organization which values releasing the creativity of leaders at all levels? Are the leaders in your organization optimistic and encouraging regarding people contributing fresh ideas?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “Can I suspend judgment and allow new ideas to flow and flourish?” You need to have faith in your own creativity and encourage the fresh ideas of others at work to   successfully achieve desired results.

Are you open to creative thinking or overly critical of new ideas? How effective are you at encouraging creativity? Are you passionate about creating a climate of innovation at work fueled by meaning, purpose, and a creative spirit?

Seven Sources of New Ideas

According to Peter Drucker, four areas of opportunity for innovation exist within a company or industry:

1.    Unexpected occurrences
2.    Incongruities
3.    Process needs
4.    Industry and market changes

Three others exist outside a company in its social and intellectual environment:

5.    Demographic changes
6.    Changes in perception
7.   New knowledge

Business leaders must change how they think about innovation. They must change how their company cultures reflect that thinking. If people are given opportunities, innovation can be bolstered anywhere if people are encouraged to use good ideas from all sources inside or outside the company. Innovation and creativity are far less mysterious than previously thought. They are a matter of taking developed ideas and applying them in new situations. If the company has the right connections and the right attitude, it works.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and creativity, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Being More Creative – Negativity Is the Enemy of Creativity

Are you working in an organization which values releasing the creativity of leaders at all levels? Are the leaders in your organization optimistic and encouraging regarding people contributing fresh ideas?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “Can I suspend judgment and allow new ideas to flow and flourish?” You need to have faith in your own creativity and encourage the fresh ideas of others at work to successfully achieve desired results.

Are you open to creative thinking or overly critical of new ideas? How effective are you at encouraging creativity? Are you passionate about creating a climate of innovation at work fueled by meaning, purpose, and a creative spirit?

Negative self-judgment is compounded when new ideas in the workplace are systematically criticized. There is often a belief in the workplace that having a sharp critical eye is preferred by managers and leaders. Such a negative bias can kill creativity.

Michael Ray is a Stanford professor who teaches creative entrepreneurs through his class “Personal Creativity in Business”.  According to Ray, there are five qualities of creativity:

1.  intuition
2.  will
3.  joy
4.  strength
5.  compassion

Those qualities are drawn out of people by four tools:

1.  faith in your own creativity
2.  absence of judgment
3.  precise observation
4.  penetrating questions

“Everything in the world already exists; whatever seems new is only something old rearranged.”                 ― Max de Pree

The paradox of success is that when things are going well there’s no need to change. Innovation needs to begin before a need is felt. Customer or client complaints when viewed objectively and not defensively can point to areas where change is needed.

Cognitive psychologists have shown that the biggest hurdle to solving problems often isn’t ignorance - it’s access to the right information at the right time. Information sharing within big organizations is not easy due to geographic distances, political squabbles, internal competition and bad incentive systems that hinder the spread of ideas.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and creativity, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Creativity - Meaning is the Key to Engaging Creativity

Are you working in an organization that values creativity and innovation? Are the leaders in your organization open to everyone discovering meaning in their work?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What is my core identity and how can I align who I am with being fully engaged in meaningful work?” You need to know who you are to successfully achieve desired results.

Do you know your core identity? How effective are you at encouraging creativity? Are you passionate about the work you do fueled by meaning, purpose, and a creative spirit?

Meaning Is the Key to Engaging Creativity

Whenever someone has a burst of creativity, it is because they’ve spent time thinking over some problem or situation that has meaning for them. They have become immersed and totally engaged. If we want people to be innovative, we must discover what is important to them, and we must engage them in meaningful issues.

Michael Ray is a Stanford professor who has led some of Silicon Valley’s most creative entrepreneurs through his class “Personal Creativity in Business” for the past 21 years. Underlying his teaching on creativity is a search for two fundamental questions:

1.  Who is my self?
2.  What is my work?

Ray says you can’t know what or how you want to create until you know who you are and what you hope to do with your life. He believes that creativity exists within everyone. When people can’t tap into their creativity it’s because of an internal “voice of judgment” which is often heavily influenced by society, employers and parents.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and creativity, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Become More Innovative - How to Enhance Creativity in the Workplace

Are you working in an organization that values innovation and creativity? Are the leaders in your organization open to possibility?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What new ideas can we put into action right now?” You need to continually change to be successful.

How effective are you at encouraging creativity?

Enhancing  Creativity in the Workplace

People will be most creative when they feel motivated by their work, in and of itself. When people are engaged because of their own natural interest and satisfaction in their work, they will be challenged to be creative through their own intrinsic motivation. External pressures or rewards are never as effective as internal motivation. In order to tap into that resource, people must be matched to jobs that tap into underlying values that motivate and excite them.

In addition to intrinsic motivation, two other components are necessary within an individual for creative resourcefulness, according to Theresa Amabile (Harvard Business Review, 1998).

1.  Expertise: a person must have the necessary technical, procedural and intellectual knowledge.
2.  Creative-thinking skills: a person must be able to use their thinking in flexible and imaginative ways.

Trying to develop someone’s expertise and creative-thinking skills can be time-consuming. It is far easier to enhance and tap into someone’s internal motivation.

Amabile writes about six managerial practices that enhance creativity. These categories emerged from more than two decades of research that focused on the links between environment and creativity.

1.  Challenge: Matching the right person with the right job in order to play into their expertise and creative thinking skills. Making a good match requires the manager to have access to important information about employees and their preferences. This may mean using information available through assessments such as DISC, PIAV, Meyers-Briggs or other instruments that indicate values and preferences. This also requires good listening and observing. People express what interests them and excites them all the time. Are you listening?

2.  Freedom: Intrinsic motivation and ownership is enhanced when people are free to approach their work the way they choose. Managers tend to mismanage freedom by changing goals frequently or failing to define them clearly. Worse, they grant freedom in name only, declaring employees to be “empowered” and then they delineate the process to be followed and give penalties for divergence.

3.  Resources: Time and money can either support or kill creativity. Some time pressures can heighten creativity. Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. This creates distrust, or burnout. Creativity takes time. Incubation periods have to be scheduled in.

Project resources that are too limited can push people to use their creativity to finding additional resources, rather than actually developing new products or services.

4.  Work-Group Features: Managers must create teams with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. When people come together with diverse intellectual foundations and approaches to work, ideas often combine in exciting and useful ways.

Managers often make the mistake of putting similar people together. This may seem desirable because the people see eye to eye and get along, thus making decisions quicker. Their very homogeneity, however, does little to enhance expertise and creative thinking.

5.  Supervisory Encouragement: Managers neglect to praise creative successes and unsuccessful efforts and thereby inadvertently contribute to stifle creativity. To sustain passion, people need to feel their work matters and is important. A certain tolerance is required for mistakes and failures so that they can be used creatively.

Managers often look for reasons not to use a new idea. Research shows that an interesting psychological dynamic underlies this phenomenon. People believe that their bosses will perceive them as smarter if they demonstrate critical, analytical thinking.

This creates a bias that has severe consequences for the creative process. Such a culture of evaluation leads people to focus on external rewards and punishments instead of on being creative. It creates a climate of fear that undermines intrinsic motivation.

6.  Organizational Support: Creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organization supports it. Leaders can support creativity by ensuring that information sharing and collaboration is the norm. Political problems and gossip take people’s attention away from work. That sense of mutual purpose and excitement that is so central to tapping into the power of intrinsic motivation must be encouraged and supported. It can be killed by cliques and political factions.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching Secrets to Become More Innovative- Creating a Culture of Innovation

Are you working in an organization that values innovation and creativity? Are the leaders in your organization open to possibility?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What new ideas can we put into action right now?” You need to continually change to be successful.

How effective are you at encouraging creativity?

An enterprise that does not innovate will not survive long. Management that does not learn to innovate and foster creativity will not last long. Businesses and organizations have to be designed for change as the norm. They must create change rather than react to it.

Innovation is the means by which the entrepreneur creates new wealth-producing resources. It also enables existing resources to have enhanced potential for creating wealth. Innovation is an effort to create purposeful, focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential.

Some innovations come in a flash of genius, but most result from a conscious and purposeful search for opportunities. Above all, innovation is work rather than genius. It requires knowledge, ingenuity and focus. Without diligence, persistence and commitment, all the talent, ingenuity and knowledge are to no avail.

In order to innovate, there must be a fertile atmosphere of creativity. Unleashing creativity requires more than brainstorming sessions. It is more than problem solving. People have ideas all the time. The real question is, “Which ideas are you going to use?”

Few workplaces actually encourage creativity. Management inadvertently stifles it with procedures and the status quo necessary for stability and performance. Individuals stifle it internally through their own voice of judgment.

Negativity, judgment and fear are the enemies of creativity. To the extent these exist in the work environment, there can be little creativity. In business, it isn’t enough for an idea to be original; it must also be applicable to creating greater economic growth. It must improve a product or service in some way.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.

Executive Coaching to Create High Performance Companies – The Halo Effect Delusion

Are you clear on what contributes to your company’s high performance? Do you need to clarify exactly what are the drivers of performance in your business?

One of the most powerful questions you can ask as a leader is “What are the true drivers of our performance?” You need to make attributions based on reliable data.

Are you sure what makes your company successful?

The Halo Effect Delusion

Psychologist Edward Thorndike researched the ways superiors rated subordinates during World War I. If a soldier was given a high rating for one trait, his superior officer usually provided high ratings for all other traits. And if a soldier was rated sub-par on a trait, he usually garnered low ratings for all other traits.

Thorndike called this the “Halo Effect”: our tendency to make inferences about specific traits on the basis of a general impression. It’s difficult for most people to measure discrete traits; we tend to blend them together. The Halo Effect tricks the mind into creating and maintaining a coherent, consistent picture.

For example, after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush’s overall approval rating rose sharply. The percentage of Americans who approved of his handling of the economy also rose. There’s no reason to believe the latter suddenly improved in the weeks after Sept. 11, but it was hard for Americans to separate these issues.

Our minds become uncomfortable when we approve of one area of performance, but not another. We create consistency by conferring a halo across the board to avoid cognitive dissonance.

When companies are profitable and sales are growing, we routinely attribute positive evaluations to other performance particulars. Numbers don’t lie; we trust them. So, when we make inferences about company culture, customer outreach and core strategies based on financials, we succumb to the Halo Effect.

It’s hard to know in objective terms exactly what constitutes good communications, optimal group cohesion or appropriate role clarity, so we make attributions based on other data we believe to be reliable.

Good People Equals Good Results?

It’s widely believed that companies that manage people well will outperform those that don’t. This was the conclusion of the landmark book Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results With Ordinary People, by Charles A. O’Reilly III and Jeffrey Pfeffer (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). A company that attracts people, provides them with an environment where they can be productive and creative, and motivates them to work for the common good ought to do well. But how much of the research is influenced by the Halo Effect?

We bestow halos on CEOs all the time, but they’re always based on company performance. In all of the books written about good leadership, descriptions are always accompanied by company performance based on financial data.

Why is it so hard to understand why some companies succeed and others fail? Because our thinking is shaped by the Halo Effect. Even when we try to gather data in large-scale samples like Fortune Magazine surveys or Great Places to Work studies, we often multiply the Halo Effect.

This is less of a conscious distortion and more of a natural human tendency to make judgments about abstract, ambiguous concepts based on seemingly objective criteria. Our desire to find answers and create a coherent story is too compelling to withstand.

Awareness of such tendencies may help us guard against the Halo Effect. Of course, solid research also helps.

While the Halo Effect is not the only delusion that distorts our thinking about business, it’s the most basic one. This flaw permeates most surveys and interviews, weakens the quality of data, and diminishes our ability to think clearly about important factors that lead to key decisions.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a high performance leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.