How much of your team's focus is solely on the important things?
If it’s important, you’ll find a way. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse. Ryan Blair
All high-performance businesses and leaders juggle MANY balls at once. It’s par for the course, but it is not sustainable. The challenge is to establish (sooner rather than later), which balls you’ll allow to fall to the ground, and which MUST stay in the air. And to be really clear, I am talking about at the Executive Level AND every other level in your business. This is about ensuring that your Business Strategy, captured in your Strategic Plan on a Page, is the blueprint for what things the whole business is focusing on in a given Quarter.
As you know, we strongly advocate dealing with 90 days at a time, knowing full well that your next 90 days supports the achievement of your Annual Key Initiatives, which in-turn underpin the Strategic Themes needed to achieve your 3HAG, which if delivered will give us a fighting chance to land somewhere near to our 10+ year out Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Total alignment of the "now" with the long term vision!
You have all the tools necessary. As part of our Quarterly Growth Advisory CEO + Leadership Team sessions, we get to clearly identify what are the 5 (max!) most important priorities for our business. But knowledge and identifying priorities is not everything. We still get seduced into pursuing tangential, exciting, pet projects that frustrate others in the organisation, and cause chaos and fractures across teams. There may well be reason for pursuing something OFF PLAN. And I am ok with that, so long as the pursuit follows a hearty discussion with the Executive Team about the agreed priorities seemingly needing to change. This discussion should not be taken lightly.
Further to this, there really should be no excuses for coming to the end of a quarter and reviewing the business’ performance only to find that one or more priorities were not progressed to the expected level. This wreaks of excuses, which according to the quote above, suggests that we as a team got our priorities wrong. If they were in fact the 5 most important things for our business, we should have zero excuses and instead would have worked as a high-performance team to challenge each other and find a way/ways to progress the priority. The role of every member of the Executive Team is FIRST to the Executive Team, and THEN their team. The Weekly Executive Team meeting is the opportunity to eliminate any excuses! This meeting also serves an important function that is to NOT let 1 single week slip by on a priority.
Please ensure you share this with you Leadership Team and use this briefing as a reminder to ensure that we as a business must remain super focused. We want to deliver exquisitely on what were identified as the most important for our business in the next 90 days. A high-performance team will find a way and not accept any excuses!
Have a good week and grow well!!
Adam