One-third of 2008 is now history. And whether or not you believe we’re in a recession, it’s clear there’s uncertainty.

How are you responding as time marches on and as economic adversity becomes more of a reality? Are your 2008 objectives still attainable?

For organizations operating on a calendar fiscal year, May is a good time to take a hard look at determining what’s working and what isn’t.

If you and your team are not operating from a written plan you’re not alone. It’s estimated that four out of five businesses don’t have a written plan. Most of these are small companies. Even businesses that have a written plan have trouble executing it. Studies show that only one company in four actually integrates its plan into day-to-day operations.

Plans fail to deliver the results leaders expect for three primary reasons:

1. They’re too complicated.
2. There’s little genuine excitement for the plan.
3. Lack of follow-through to execute the plan.

Let’s look more closely at problems with execution.

10 Reasons Execution Fails

In my work with leadership teams, I’ve found 10 reasons – excuses, really – execution continues to be a problem for most organizations.

Interestingly, nine of these 10 reasons are internal. Only one of these reasons is external, which I’ve categorized as “changing market conditions.” It’s true that “changing market conditions” covers a lot of territory, but the point remains that leaders have more control than they might otherwise believe to drive performance inside their organization.

I’ve already shared with you two other reasons execution breaks down.

The first is the plan itself. If your plan is too long, too complicated, overly ambitious or incredibility ambiguous about who will do what by when – you’ve wasted your time developing your plan. Any one of these factors threatens execution. My new book includes a template that shows you step-by-step how to develop a plan that’s 10 to 20 PowerPoint slides. There’s another template for a one-page annual plan.

The second reason execution suffers is from lack of genuine buy-in. People who’ve had a hand in developing a plan will be much more likely to embrace it. Lack of real involvement from the team that must execute the plan means the plan is dead on arrival.

Here’s a fourth reason execution is a problem for most organizations.

Play to Strengths

When thinking about what must be done, keep in mind who should do it.

Jim Buchanan, CEO of Buchanan Associates, uses a model he calls a “triad” to assemble teams in departments and for projects in his 400-person IT company. This approach matches an individual’s skill to the job to be done and is based on the belief that no single person is capable of excelling at the three facets that comprise a successful engagement in his organization.

In Jim’s organization, the three facets of the triad (think of a triangle) are “People,” “Process” and “Technology.” (If you’re not a technology company, substitute “Subject Matter Expertise” for “Technology” and you’ll have your triad.)

Leaders should play to peoples’ strengths and manage around their weaknesses. You’re mostly wasting time trying to improve a person’s weakness – it’s better to acknowledge the weakness and compensate for it with a second or third person who’s strong in that area, then allow the first person to do what they do best.

It’s a model to keep in mind as you start to think more specifically about who will do what.

Lesson: People excel at things they like to do. To improve performance, play to their strengths.

Take action

Ask and answer these four questions to improve your performance:

1. Are roles and responsibilities clearly defined?
2. Have we put people in positions to succeed?
3. At the end of the day, does everyone one know whether or not they had a successful day?
4. How effective is our performance review process?

You can achieve your 2008 objectives if you have the right people doing the right things the right way.  

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Would you like Greg Bustin to train or speak to executive management staff at your company?

Contact Us today to learn more!

Would you like Greg Bustin to train or speak to executive management staff at your company?

Contact Us today to learn more!

Would you like Greg Bustin to train or speak to executive management staff at your company?

Contact Us today to learn more!

“Whether or not you believe we’re in a recession, it’s clear there’s uncertainty,” said Bustin. “This workshop will provide proven, practical tools high-performing leadership teams use to improve performance while less-prepared companies struggle, retrench and cut back.”

 After years of helping leaders produce results, Greg opens his playbook for busy executives. And it works!  
The workshop will address the following issues:

• A quick assessment of an organization’s current performance
• The 10 warning signs of trouble
• How to attain and sustain buy-in throughout your organization
• Where to find increased revenue, profitability and productivity
• A set of tools for driving accountability and sustaining improved performance

Bustin’s newest book, Lead The Way, which provides a step-by-step process for improving performance
The workshop investment has been discounted to $395 per leader, and $345 for each subsequent leader from the same organization.

Greg Bustin leads a group of successful CEOs committed to improving their performance, and within the last six months has presented private workshops to 26 CEO groups throughout the U.S.

For more information about the workshop or to register, visit http://www.bustin.com/events.html or email greg.bustin@bustin.com.

What others say about Greg Bustin and his process for improving performance:

“After years of helping leaders produce results, Greg opens his playbook for busy executives. And it works!”

~ Ernest Z. Frausto, President, Nest Entertainment

“Greg brings lots of wisdom to this important topic. Count on getting plenty of practical take-aways that will help you achieve your 2008 objectives and enter 2009 stronger than ever.”

~ David Boyett, Vistage Chair

But as I travel around the country talking and working with leaders, my experience has been that these same leaders are less certain and less confident when asked to summarize why clients or customers buy from their companies instead of the competition.

“Because we’re good at what we do” is a commonly heard answer. So is “Because we’re better than the competition.” Sounds like something a CEO would say, doesn’t it?

Those answers may be truthful, but they don’t reflect your competitive advantage. They fail to articulate a compelling benefit that allows you to separate yourself from the pack in the minds of your customers or clients.

What’s more, my experience has confirmed a lack of clarity in most organizations around plans, processes and procedures developed for the express purpose of leveraging strengths, replicating successes and increasing performance.

Taken one step further, my experience has been that even if the CEO can articulate the company’s value proposition, the likelihood of getting the same answer from the leadership team is small to non-existent. If the leadership team can’t articulate a compelling reason why people buy from you instead of someone else, don’t expect your customers and prospective customers to be able to do so either.

How would the leadership team at your organization fare with these questions?

Good news

If you’re beginning to feel a little uncomfortable about how your organization would answer, there are two pieces of good news.

First, the executives I work and speak with are, for the most part, leading organizations that are already successful. They’re doing a lot of things well. So if you’re in a leadership role in a company that may have trouble answering some of these questions, but the company is doing pretty well, take heart. Then imagine how much more successful the organization could be if everyone knew precisely why customers buy from you instead of the other guys.

Second, I’m happy to share with you a process you can use to gain clarity and agreement around who you are as an organization and what makes your organization special.

In my new book Lead The Way, I include a model called an Identity Pyramid to help leadership teams define points of difference and confirm values, principles and processes that are essential components of the organization. Over the years, my firm developed a list of 100 Critical Questions for use in strategic planning sessions with our clients.

Space doesn’t permit me to share the Identity Pyramid or all of the questions, but here are seven to get you started (I use the term “customers” for customers and clients, since there’s a difference):

1. How would we describe our company today? What’s our culture?
2. How would our customers and prospects describe our company? Why would they say this?
3. What is our unfair advantage that causes our customers to select us over the competition?
4. Have we made our competitive advantage a centerpiece with our stakeholders?
5. Are we charging what we should based on the value this advantage offers our customers?
6. If we charged more for this product or service, would our customers still buy from us?
7. Have we articulated this advantage in a way that is easily understood and compelling?

Clarity around these and other related issues that examine performance from inside-out and outside-in perspectives will inspire greater loyalty to your organization with internal and external stakeholders. What’s more, clarity around these issues will also improve productivity and increase revenue and profitability.

Be yourself

This exercise and these questions and others like them are designed to uncover or confirm your intrinsic competitive advantage – an advantage that already exists within your organization.

It’s not a process designed to make your company into something it is not.

“Be yourself,” said Oscar Wilde. “Everyone else is already taken.”

This is a simple but powerful process for helping your company sell more of what customers and clients already are buying from you.

Take action

Ask and answer the seven questions above.

What other questions can you ask that will confirm, clarify or uncover an advantage you may have been overlooking or taking for granted?

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Why do some companies consistently outperform their competitors – even during tough times? What steps can we take to raise our performance and protect ourselves in a downturn?

Greg Bustin leads a group of successful CEOs committed to improving their performance, and his newest book Lead The Way provides a step-by-step process for improving performance. In the last six months Bustin has presented private workshops to 26 CEO groups throughout the U.S.

His new workshop is being offered for the first time at an May 9 workshop in Dallas, Texas.

Bustin recently surveyed 200 leaders and asked them to name their biggest performance challenges. The top three responses were 1) Gaining buy-in among the leadership team on corporate priorities, 2) Following through to execute the company’s business plan, and 3) Driving accountability throughout the organization.

This workshop will provide proven, practical solutions to these issues and more. Here’s what you and your team will take away:

• A quick assessment of your organization’s performance
• The 10 warning signs of trouble
• How to attain and sustain buy-in throughout your organization
• Where to find increased revenue, profitability and productivity
• A set of tools for driving accountability and sustaining improved performance

Cost: $395 per leader; $345 for each subsequent leader from the same organization.

Location: Park Cities Hilton

Time: 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m.

Seating is limited to 24 people on a first-come, first-served basis.

In my new book Lead The Way, we peel back the curtain on several companies that all started small. Today, they’re big businesses. And they’re among the most admired companies in the world. They are considered the gold standards in their industry – and beyond. Not only for what they have accomplished as organizations. But also for the leaders they have produced and their achievements of innovation, effectiveness and continuous improvement.

And, most important, for the way in which they have achieved and now sustain their success.

From time to time throughout 2008, I’ll share with you some of these lessons. You and your team may be applying these practices in your organization, in which case this information will simply affirm the work you already are doing to sustain high levels of performance. For others, the lessons will serve as reminders that a few simple practices – implemented well – can help you and your team achieve the results you are expecting.

In each case, you’ll see that these concepts are fundamental. But as I travel throughout the country visiting with leaders, I continue to be struck by the fact that common sense is not always common practice.

What gets measured is what gets done

FedEx is an organization obsessed with customer service and focused on tracking it.

The company was founded by Fred Smith and began operating on April 17, 1973, with 14 aircraft connecting 25 U.S. cities. Today, FedEx provides time-definite shipping to more than 220 countries and territories.

A big part of the success of FedEx is built on a foundation of measuring everything with special attention paid to speed, reliability and cost. My friend Keith Martino, a former worldwide sales manager at FedEx whose team was twice recognized as the top global accounts group in the world, says the entire organization is focused on executing against Quality Service Indicators that track 12 key areas of business performance.

These indicators include specific customer service areas such as “friendliness,” “cleanliness of retail locations” and, of course “timeliness.” Each of these 12 areas is further refined to measure specific performance. The area of “timeliness,” for instance, breaks down into categories such as “same-day late” (an afternoon versus morning measurement that helps pinpoint breakdowns at the local level) and “wrong-day late” (which can help FedEx focus on problems occurring further upstream at the airline level).

It’s this measurement system that helps maintain superb levels of business performance and, as a result, extremely satisfied customers. The company continues to fine-tune its customer satisfaction measurement systems “to be sure we take into account everything customers feel is important in creating an exceptional relationship with FedEx.”

Business unit, departmental and individual plans are based on the overall corporate plan. These plans are reviewed as often as the team leaders believe they need to be – for some it’s daily, for other it’s weekly, for others it may be monthly. The plans are then formally reviewed for payout on an annual basis. Individuals that achieve their objectives receive bonuses and opportunities for advancement. Those that don’t meet objectives receive no bonuses and are graded down – a rarity at FedEx because “everyone is focused on hitting their objectives.”

“We make it very clear to everybody what they need to do every day,” says founder and chairman Fred Smith. “We manage the continuous improvement in a mathematical manner every single day. Our service gets better each year.”

Whether you are responsible for sustaining high levels of performance or increasing performance as an organization rebuilds, measurement is key.

Lesson: If it’s important, measure it.

Take action

Ask and answer these five questions:

1. How do we currently define effectiveness in our organization?
2. How do we measure effectiveness?
3. Do we have a system in place to measure customer satisfaction?
4. What about employee morale? Employee productivity?
5. Are we receiving the return on our investments of time, talent and money we want?

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It’s estimated that 80% of executive teams do not take the time to develop a plan. Some of these teams mistake budgeting for planning. Budgeting is a form of planning, but it’s not the same thing. I’ve been told by those that don’t operate from a business plan that planning is a waste of time. Things in the plan will change. Other things won’t get done. Why bother?

Of those that take the time to plan, only one in four actually follows through with implementation.

The Top 5%

That means that only about 5% of companies operate from a plan where all team members know the corporate goals and their individual responsibility for achieving them.

This small segment of business year after year effectively outperforms its competitors. These companies usually outperform themselves. They get better and better year after year.

Currently, there’s talk about whether the U.S. is headed for a recession. Some believe we’re already in a recession and we’re simply waiting to hit bottom.

The CEOs and leadership teams that I work with continue to be cautiously optimistic about their plans for 2008. These leaders are now taking steps to re-evaluate their priorities, consider a range of scenarios that can threaten their business plan, and adapt to new opportunities. All the while watching less-disciplined companies thrash around in the undertows of ineffectiveness and uncertainty.

For those not in the top 5% of planning and execution, it’s not too late to start to improve. What if you could focus your resources so that both you and your business not only survived a downturn but actually emerge from the next wave of economic uncertainty in a stronger position than ever before?

Is it possible to operate at higher levels of effectiveness during tough times? Yes.

How?

Driving Performance

After 25 years of working with and observing hundreds of senior business leaders – during which time I led teams through three U.S. recessions – I’ve concluded that what separates those leaders that are most effective from all the rest is their ability to do one thing exceptionally well.

The most successful leaders win consistently because they have a plan that they work.

That may sound like two things, but to maximize your performance, you must develop a plan and then work it. I’ve seen companies execute without a plan. They can do this for a time, but they will rarely thrive. And I’ve seen companies develop a plan that sits on the shelf. A strategically sound plan that maps specific initiatives and areas for improvement will deliver little new value to an organization if there’s no follow-through or if things continue to be done the way they’ve always been done. On the other hand, consistent execution of a flawed strategy can actually accelerate an organization’s demise.

To improve performance, organizations require a smart plan that’s executed crisply and consistently.

These teams work their plan to deliver results effectively and profitably. They make time work for them by getting everyone in the business focused on the right things and performing at consistently high levels of execution.

Plans fail in their execution for three primary reasons: 1) they’re too complicated, 2) there’s little genuine excitement about the plan, and 3) there’s only lukewarm commitment to execute it. CEOs say, “Give me a fast, simple process my team will believe in and that will produce bottom-line results.”

The laser-like approach you’ll find in Lead The Way uses a series of exercises developed from years of watching and working with hundreds of senior leaders who are committed to improving their companies’ results.

With discipline, you can turn your ideas, dreams and plans into improved performance.

Do you have what it takes to be among the top 5% of high-performing companies in business today?

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You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint. Why would you try to build your business without a written plan?

Yet as inevitably as the seasons change, thousands of companies every year shut their doors because of the leadership team’s failure to develop a written plan and then implement it. Tens of thousands of other companies fail to reach their full potential for the same reason.

It’s true that a poor planning process is a giant distraction and a huge waste of time.

Properly conceived and carried out, however, planning can help any organization become more effective. The paradox of planning is that the very act of preparing a plan will help you and your team pinpoint significant opportunities for increased effectiveness and profitability even though the chances are good you won’t implement your plan as it was developed. This is what makes planning indispensable. Other benefits of planning are examined in the first of my book’s three sections (Section Two of the book provides a toolkit along with exercises for leading an effective planning session; Section Three provides tools and approaches for the effective implementation of your written plan).

What’s stopping you?

Why don’t more companies develop a plan that they will implement?

It’s estimated that four out of five businesses don’t operate from a written plan. Most of these are small companies. Yet of those businesses that invest the time to develop a written plan, studies show that only one company in four actually integrates its plan into day-to-day operations.

Do executives believe that preparing a budget is the same thing as preparing a plan? Or are they not sure how to create a plan? Are they intimidated by the process? Or do they believe the idea of planning is a giant time-waster because no single individual really owns what’s in the plan? Are they concerned that changing marketplace conditions will render the plan obsolete within weeks of its development?

Unfortunately, my experience working with leadership teams supports the findings that the vast majority of businesses today operates without a written plan. If these reasons – excuses, really – are what’s stopping you, it’s time to take a fresh look at the power of effective planning.

Most of the CEOs of small businesses that I’ve worked with substitute some form of budgeting for a planning process. Budgeting is a form of planning, but there’s more to planning than just crunching numbers. Other CEOs haven’t committed their plans to paper. They believe everyone already knows what to do, so the mandate becomes doing more of the same thing next year.

I also see some confusion between annual planning and strategic planning.

If you’ve not planned at all or you’ve had difficultly implementing your plans, your initial approach to planning should be to develop an annual plan. This type of approach focuses on affirming values and direction, establishing priorities and translating those priorities into specific objectives with supporting action items, responsibilities and deadlines. An annual plan is fairly tactical and operational. Thought must be given to this plan, but its primary value is derived from getting all of your leaders focused on the most important operational issues that they and their teams will implement over the next 12 months to improve performance.

Once you’ve developed and implemented an annual plan, you and your team can turn your attention in Year 2 to developing and implementing a strategic plan. A strategic plan focuses on determining the new opportunities you should investigate or pursue. Where are the gaps or opportunities in our product or service offerings? What emerging patterns or trends have we identified that we may be able to capitalize upon? Are there any competitors or up-and-coming businesses that we should look at acquiring? Strategic planning should examine fresh opportunities that can increase your profitable growth.

Rate your organization’s performance

First things first. Before you can plan for the future, it’s a good idea to understand your current position.

I’ve developed a 30-question diagnostic tool that takes about four minutes to complete and allows you to assess your organization’s performance, and see for yourself where your business is doing well and where it’s most vulnerable.

Here are six of the 30 questions. Circle 5 if your organization consistently conforms to this statement, 3 if it sometimes conforms, and 1 if your organization rarely or never conforms.

If your score for these six questions is 23 or above, you likely are doing a number of important things effectively, so you’ll want to continue to maintain your strengths and examine areas where renewed focus and discipline can deliver the greatest potential to improve your performance.

If your score is 22 or below, your company’s effectiveness is being diminished significantly. Leadership issues are hampering your organization’s performance, and your score indicates you are responding to issues rather than driving toward a specific goal.

As the leader, your job is to create value for your organization. This quick diagnostic tool can help you pinpoint areas in your organization to increase effectiveness. So ask yourself: “What one action taken today will improve performance in the next 30 days?”

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