In Pursuit of Excellence

Alignment is a bit of a baby topic right now, but it’s critical and will be added to soon and often. As the sub-title of In Pursuit of Excellence is “Engagement > Alignment > Execution > Results” I am maintaining a Roadmap for each of the first three topics, posted under “Pages” at the top right of the Home Page.

Other Roadmaps:

A Roadmap: Engagement in the Education and Business Worlds (ENGAGE!) These posts explore engagement in both the academic and business / industry worlds, as they are very much related.

Roadmap to Management System Excellence (EXECUTE!) Stuff doesn’t just happen. Robust systems make the process world go around. All things ISO and Baldrige Criteria-related.

A Roadmap to Alignment–You Are Here (ALIGN!) Alignment, pet term “being on the same page”, comes in many shapes and sizes, the most critical being alignment…

• Between the company’s goals and values and your own;
• Of your position’s accountabilities to the company’s top strategies; and
• Of your job and career to your personal strengths and motivators.

Following are thumbnails for posts related to strategy and alignment. Scope of “strategy” includes vision, mission, guiding principles and how these are communicated and acted upon. Both personal alignment and business alignment are examined, per the three bullets above. NOT in scope is how to develop a plan. I’ll assume that your company already has a plan or you wouldn’t be here browsing around, you’d be on the street corner looking for spare change.

The Business Case for Alignment and Engagement One supports the other, and there is a growing body of research supporting the idea that this stuff makes good business sense. This is a lengthier Page posting, linked at the top right of the In Pursuit of Excellence home page along with the roadmaps.

Missions With Meaning  One of the fundamental issues with missions in general is their lack of legs-so often they are nothing but cool words on the wall…Whenever I’ve been in a position to have an influence on these things, I’ve championed cascading of the core mission: departments and even individuals draft their mission and objectives based on how they support the core mission. This ties in perfectly to performance management which, in theory, should be the executioner / enforcer of the mission…

What’s Your Alignment Quotient? We are making a huge, dangerous assumption if we think that even a third of our people truly understand half of leadership’s strategic musings. Actually, can you be sure the individuals on the leadership team interpret your strategy the same way? If not, how can they execute?

Why is it so many mission statements never come down off the wall? Because they’re written in a foreign language. Same with strategy.

Performance Management and Flawless Execution Without naming names, but in all honesty…what do you think about performance management? What makes it work? What makes it a curse and a time-waster? Is performance management a semi-annual ritual done in “check-the-box” fashion to keep HR off your back? Or is performance management a truly value-adding tool to help manage strategy execution?

Change and Communication – Both Need Strategy  Read My Lips…. “I AM a Good Communicator”  OK, OK…I believe you. But do your people? Why aren’t they getting the message? It doesn’t matter what size of business, the nature of the business, or the make-up of the work force. The one most–often noted issue in companies is ineffective communication, hands-down.

Effective communication keeps the team fully engaged in the success of the company, ensuring flawless execution of the strategy and achieving desired results. It is also critical to managing the team through periods of uncertainty and change, making sure the team clearly understands the challenges the company faces, plans to address the challenges, and what their role is….

Any major initiative or broad-reaching change needs a change management strategy, and communication strategy. This is a primer on both.

DANGER: Competency-based Development Exploring the wonderful world of competency-based employee development, the model of preference in the business world. Possibly scarier yet…this is how our education system thinks and operates too.

This is a segue into strengths-based leadership….A person’s strengths are normally a manifestation of their core drivers or motivators. These skills can lead a person to high engagement when they have a chance to fully use them on the job. Engagement is a pre-requisite to alignment, or at the very least makes alignment much more effective…

ACCOUNT (+) ABILITY = RESULTS (?) Without revealing anything incriminating…. what is the level of accountability you have seen where you work, or have worked in the past? What makes it high, what makes it low? If you haven’t caught it yet, one of my key themes here is strategy execution. Without accountability, nothing happens. Or, the wrong things happen. What exactly is “accountability” relative to job performance and attaining company goals?

ACCOUNTABILITY—Not Rocket Science  A simple formula in which accountability is just one element:

Clear expectations +

Knowledge, skills and abilities +

Accountability +

Follow-up

= Results.

Personal Strategy and Self-Alignment Those of you who still have a job (I know you’re out there….) can you afford to wait until you are served notice? Be proactive….plan! To sum up—identify what really drives you beyond position, power and however much coin you need to be comfortable.  Establish goals and objectives, and craft your strategy for how you’re going to achieve them. Then, execute the plan and be true to your values. You’ll live longer, be more fun to be around, and be much more productive to boot.

Driving Strategy to Results-Service This is a brief description of a series of working sessions I provide, time and logistics permitting. Let me know if you want more information on this service, all or part. This is where the topics listed in this roadmap come together in the real world.  

Driving Strategy to Results is an application-intensive series of working sessions for company leaders. The purpose is not to develop strategy—you are in business because you already have a plan. Rather, Driving Strategy focuses on ensuring flawless execution of your existing strategy to produce maximum results, so you can sustain and grow your business.