Be Different or be dead

April 19, 2017

4 proven ways to execute your business plan better

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4 proven ways to execute your business plan better.

With so many experts around, running a successful business is complicated.

There are finance experts who promulgate principles for having a healthy balance sheet; sales wizards who describe what an effective sales funnel looks like; inventory management specialists who define the level of product turnover required to drive optimum operating margins and leadership pundits who prescribe the fundamentals necessary to maximize employee engagement and loyalty.

Each discipline brings their own specific area of expertise to the table to help organizations enhance their performance, but how does leadership determine which specific tools are key to improving their organization?

It’s too complicated.

There are numerous moving parts involved in how an organization operates, and determining how each component part should be synchronized to optimize overall effectiveness is an extremely difficult challenge.

It’s like a golfer trying to improve their game.

There are lessons in how to address the ball, grip the club; the backswing; the ball impact; shifting body weight; and the follow through. The golfer focuses on the grip and can’t assimilate the rest of the swing fundamentals; their game doesn’t improve to the level they expect. They are frustrated.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Business can be simplified; it can be boiled down to a single crucial focus that drives sustaining levels of remarkable performance and growth.

Leaders should be building organizations to execute brilliantly; building execution as a core competency and applying it to any strategy they create

And if they do, they will outperform their peers and outpace their competitors.

Pay attention to these four execution fundamentals.

1. Planning — Ease up on planning. The most critical element of performance is how well the strategy is carried out.

The biggest challenge for most businesses is executing well - not devising helium-filled plans for reaching the next level. — Peter Drucker

Yes, a meaningful plan with a sensible direction for the organization is required but if execution falters the plan is worthless.
An average plan brilliantly executed produces far better performance than what people might consider to be a brilliant strategy with mediocre execution.

Invest 80% of your time on planning to execute and 20% on strategic planning

2. Serving — Lead by serving those in the trenches. Serving leadership cultures unleash individual executional effort and lead to unexpected and amazing results. Leadership presence in the workplace engaging with frontline people is an incredible motivator to execute better.

“What can I do to help?” is the question serving leaders pose to reduce the grunge employees face when trying to do their job, and to eliminate internal barriers — rules and policies for example — that prevent things from getting done in a smoothie efficient way.

3. Recruiting — Recruit people ’lovers’. Customers are loyal to an organization when they feel cared for by employees who invest honest emotional energy in taking care of their wants and needs.
Execution prowess demands that millions of mind blowing moments of truth occur seamlessly between an organization and its customers 24X7X365.

This happens only when employees have the innate desire to serve another human, so your hiring plan needs to be driven to discover these folks who serve in their DNA.
And remember you can’t train people to love people; you can train ‘em to grin but that’s about it.

If your employees don’t love one another, they can’t possibly love the customer

4. Selling — Stop selling; start serving. Flogging products and services tries to advance the organization’s agenda, not the customer’s.
This one-sided dynamic may result in a single short term transaction but does nothing to create an annuity stream of revenue over the long haul.

Execution genius looks out to the horizon, so organizations need to be mindless about building and deepening rich customer relationships by serving them; marching to their agenda; subordinating the interests of the business to their interests.

Remarkable execution is vital to grow a business, so build an execution machine first and then fuel it with each strategy you have.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.19.17 at 12:06 pm by Roy Osing
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