Success: It’s Not About How You Do Something, It’s About What You Do!

Every time I get called in to turn around a failing project or an underperforming department, my brief is to help them do things better.

And yet, more often than not, the solution involves changing what they do, not how they do what they are currently doing.

We are under such time and budget pressures that we often don’t have time to question ‘the what’ we just have to act.

The problem being that when you’re focused on the wrong things it doesn’t matter how well you do the wrong job, you’re never going to achieve the results that you want.

Just look at the graphic below showing information from Six Disciplines Research.

90% of strategies fail due to poor execution.

Sounds like companies are failing because of poor execution right?

Yet 2/3rds of HR and IT Organisations have plans not linked to the Strategy, and 90% of front line employees are paid for work that is not linked to the Strategy.

This is not about poor execution of the Strategy, but the non-execution of the Strategy and if you don’t execute the strategy then you are never ever going to achieve the goals of the Strategy.

When only 1/4 of your employees have access to the strategy, 3/4 of your employees are not even in a position to question what they do, or to correct the course.

Criticising employees for doing a poor job is a cop out, this is a failure of ledership.

Peter Drucker says ‘Management is about people doing the job right, leadership is about ensuring they are doing the right job’.

Leadership’s number one job should be to ensure their departments, teams, and employees are working on the right things, the strategies things.

If you’re not getting the results you want don’t just check the quality of the work that’s done, check the alignment of what’s being done with the strategy or the expectations you’re aiming for.

If your teams are focused on the right things, then focus on improving their performance.

If. they’re not and you trying to improve the wrong performance then you are compounding the problem, not fixing it you are throwing good money after bad.

Fixing the wrong problem and blaming the employees just leads to frustration, motivation, and disengagement.

Whereas getting people working on the right things will lead to progress which creates momentum, builds motivation and drives employee engagement.

Everyone wants to be successful and it’s leadership’s job to set their teams up for success.

If you want to know more about how to improve performance then click the link and let’s book a time to talk about how I can help.