For most business leaders, nothing is easy. Success comes as a result of a unique strategic business plan, great people, and flawless execution. There are many controllable and uncontrollable variables that go into those three things and the best leaders in the world can find the right balance and consistency over time to be successful.
For example, take the leader of a team responsible for the design, development, and production of launching new products within a giant, global specialty chemicals company. The team leader needs to understand the strategy of the overall business and then align that strategy to the decisions being made at the operational team level. She also has to hire, develop, and retain the best team to be able to implement the strategy. She needs to manage the supply chain to acquire the right raw materials for prototype products. And she also needs to make sure that the implementation is safe and flawless; producing and delivering the best products to the customers and the markets.
But what if one, two, or three of those things are missing?
What if the overall strategic plan isn’t focused and doesn’t deliver a unique value proposition to customers? What happens is the leader goes from strong planning to dreaming of ways to make something broken work…
And what if the team is comprised of the wrong people and you discover they are poorly trained, motivated, and lack the tools to be successful? What happens is the leader starts hoping people will figure it out and grow into their roles…
And finally, what happens if the leader doesn’t have the skills, tools, processes, or people to execute flawlessly? What happens is the leader starts wishing for things to work out and wishes for a few lucky breaks along the way…
Unfortunately, Wish-Hope-Dream is not an effective business model and will surely lead to disastrous results. You can fool yourself, you can fool your team, and sometimes you can fool the leaders you report to, but there comes a point where you must acknowledge the reality and stop wishing, hoping, and dreaming.
Based on the work we do in the area of Fundamentals of Business Leadership, I am pleased to share three tips on how change this mindset.
1 - Understand the Strategic Plan No Matter What Level You Are in the Organization
Effective leaders can live in the macro and the micro at the same time. At the end of the day, strategy and the strategic plan comes down to one thing; how are you going to offer a unique and profitable value proposition to customers who want it? The secret is in understanding the value proposition. There are only three different ways that a company can offer unique value; either through superior products, customer focus, or by having the lowest possible price. No company can be successful trying more than one. Pick your interpretation of your company’s value proposition and align your team to it.
2 - Pick the Right People and Exit the One That Don’t Fit
Develop new products is a project, developing and retaining people that don’t fit the strategy and your team is not. The pressure is too great to live with people on your team who don’t belong. The strongest leaders in the world leverage human resources to hire the right people. But if someone doesn’t fit – whether it is for a lack of skills, a lack of will, or both, then you can’t wish it will get better. You need to take immediate action and fix the problems.
3 – Create the Processes and Metrics that Ensure Flawless Execution
Unforced errors and mistakes are why professional athletes fail. It’s no different in the business world. Forgetting to order a critical raw material, not effectively conducting quality control on a customer pilot program, or missing a flight to the big customer meeting are all failures in execution that shouldn’t happen. The most effective leaders create the processes that pay attention to the details, creates a mindset around execution, and institute the metrics that measure success in support of flawless execution. If the processes don’t work or the metrics are showing poor execution results, then the leader knows something must change and has the data to do so.