Why leaders need an execution system

Can you imagine leading a team that did not know what their purpose was, did not know what to do to achieve the purpose and were not being held accountable for their contribution towards progress? This is not a place you want to be in as a leader.

Research across multiple industries has shown that up to 87% of employees have no idea what they should be doing relevant to organizational goals*. To compound this frightening statistic, 50% of the same employees did not even know what the goals were. Scary stuff if you are truly trying to lead a high-performance team.

An execution system provides the rules for planning and monitoring business performance, relevant to strategy. A playbook if you like. The playbook should include elements such as;

• Prioritisation of strategic deliverables
• Setting of annual targets
• Cadence of accountability
• Monitoring scorecards
• Action trackers
• Terminology definitions

It is not good enough to just ‘hope’ that strategy will be delivered, or to anecdotally report against strategy. You need to know, at any point in time, whether your team is winning. Likewise, a leader should never blame any individual or sub-team for failure to execute. You need to be better than that.

An execution system measures the potential to progress. In this way, it creates an accountability culture. Team members report, and score, against their specific tactics at an agreed cadence, usually in leadership team meetings. This reporting enables robust discussion across sub-teams. This discussion leads to increased collaboration and efficiency which, in turn, breeds trust and organizational pride.

While individuals naturally shy away from being held accountable and holding others accountable, the interesting conundrum is that they expect their leaders to be accountable and hold them accountable. As a leader, your legacy is to be respected, not necessarily liked (although it is possible to be both).

But how can you hold people accountable if they don’t know what they are being held accountable to, what their specific tactics are and what progress is expected to be made over a defined period of time? It would be like coaching a football team playing a game with no goal-posts and no scoring.

An execution system gives you the structure to build accountability within your team. The goal-posts, the playbook and the scoreboard, if you like.

Your team also needs you to give direction, provide feedback, break barriers, respectfully challenge and offer support. They require you to recognize performance, both good and bad. They want honesty and transparency. They expect you to lead by example with accountability.

Leadership is not easy but nothing truly worthwhile in life is easy. High performing leaders build systems and then combine their highly developed interpersonal skills to create winning teams.

An execution system gives you the chance to win.

*'The four disciplines of execution' McChesney, Covey and Huling