Doing the Right Things Right: How the Effective Executive Spends Time - Softcover

Stack, Laura

 
9781626565661: Doing the Right Things Right: How the Effective Executive Spends Time
Softcover
ISBN 10: 162656566X ISBN 13: 9781626565661
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A How-To Guide for the Modern Leader

Inspired by Peter Drucker’s groundbreaking book The Effective Executive, Laura Stack details precisely how 21st-century leaders and managers can obtain profitable, productive results by managing the intersection of two critical values: effectiveness and efficiency.

Effectiveness, Stack says, is identifying and achieving the best objectives for your organization—doing the right things. Efficiency is accomplishing them with the least amount of time, effort, and cost—doing things right. If you’re not clear on both, you’re wasting your time. As Drucker put it, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Stack’s 3T Leadership offers twelve practices that will enable executives to be effective and efficient, grouped into three areas where leaders spend their time: Strategic Thinking, Teamwork, and Tactics. With her expert advice, you’ll get scores of new ideas on how you, your team, and your organization can boost productivity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Stack, MBA, CSP, CPAE, is an award-winning keynote speaker, bestselling author, and noted authority on productivity. She is the CEO and president of the Productivity Pro, Inc., and a member of the Speaker Hall of Fame.


Foreword author William A. Cohen, PhD is an authority on leadership and strategy formulation and deployment. He gives speeches and seminars for the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the Air War College, the FBI Academy, all four armed services, and corporations from Boeing to The Cheesecake Factory. He is the author of The Practical Drucker.

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1
GOALS
Align Strategy and Objectives
If your team lacks clear goals, it may as well be a drunken octopus on roller skates. You’ll get just as far. To be efficient and effective, you must set team goals, align them actively with organizational goals, and communicate them to your team.

You’ll also need to regularly reevaluate your progress to ensure you’re on the right path. If you’re not already doing so, consider what course corrections might better serve you. “Strategic planning and goal setting should be linked,” advises Janie Wade, Senior Vice President of Finance for Baylor Scott & White Health. “Everyone on the team should have goals that support the plan and each other. But the plans and the goals have to leave room for the unexpected opportunities that develop.”

Goals also boost team productivity because they sow seeds of hope. They give your team something to strive for, especially if they’re coupled with a positive, nonpunitive environment where you provide valuable feedback on a regular basis. Goals establish promises that you and your team can work toward as you fine-tune performance and boost productivity.

PLANNING: THE EXECUTION CONTINUUM
The first step in goal setting is to take a good, hard look at your organizational goals. Your personal and team goals should always contribute to or support the organization’s overall goals. It’s not necessarily easy to achieve alignment, and it’s far too easy to drift off course once you have. But it is absolutely crucial to maintain your alignment, or the tactics you execute may be skewed from or entirely useless toward those goals. To keep that from happening, let’s look at a basic formula that will help bring you on course and keep you there.

Logical, Strategic Execution

As with so many other things, business has borrowed the concepts of strategy and tactics from military and games theory. Yet researchers regard them as discrete, if interrelated, topics, and confusingly, often interchangeable terms. And when business still moved at human speed, we could afford to consider them separately. But in this electronics era, we no longer can.

In a previous book, Execution IS the Strategy, I focused on strategic execution itself, and described how today, we need to perceive strategy and tactics as what they truly are: points on an Execution Continuum. That continuum begins with an organization’s core values, which represent the organization’s bedrock, the foundational beliefs upon which its founders built it. Consider some Jewish-owned businesses, which close on Saturday—the Jewish Sabbath. Or some founded upon Christian values, which close on Sunday.

A mission statement builds on the core values and succinctly describes what a company does to achieve its vision, i.e., its ultimate purpose for existing. Vision and mission are incomplete without each other. For example, the National Speakers Association (NSA), of which I was president in 2011–2012, has as its vision, “Every expert who presents content to an audience through the spoken word for a fee belongs to NSA.” Its mission is stated as, “NSA is the leading source for education, community, and entrepreneurial business knowledge needed to be successful in the speaking profession.”

Mission and vision tell us where an organization wants to go; strategy and tactics are the means by which we get there. Strategic objectives feed the operational strategies of an organization and break down into departmental goals and individual performance objectives. Tactics achieve these goals, and resulting action items are executed.

Back to Basics

Strategy tends to fall into place more easily when it’s built on mission, vision, and values—which, in turn, makes it easier to determine corresponding goals and tactics. Effective leaders hitch themselves to the organization’s star and align team and personal goals with the organization’s. Then they determine the most efficient ways to advance together.

ALIGNING YOUR TEAM
The effective, efficient executive uses alignment to strengthen the team—not only to shape its destiny but also to emphasize the mission and sow the seeds of hope for a better, more productive future. As we’ve already seen, goal setting begins in the soil of core values and is strengthened by the fertilizer of mission and vision. The outcomes are the harvest you reap.

Brenda Knowles, Vice President of Marketing at Shaw Industries, a flooring provider in Georgia, recently told me:

Our strategic planning process and management meetings ensure that managers are clear on the company’s growth strategy. With that strategic framework, we empower each of the business areas to bring forth recommendations for how to best meet customer needs and anticipate other market forces. This allows us to continue to innovate to ensure we’re meeting and exceeding customer expectations and continually improving our products, processes, and services.

So, I’d say my approach is one of including the team in the process, giving them the big picture and the guardrails, if you will, and relying upon their key strengths, insights into the company, and into our customers’ business to help propel us forward. It’s about empowerment and accountability.

Amen to that. How do you achieve such alignment?

Steps to Success

Getting strong-minded, independent people to work together on one objective can be like herding cats. But when they see how excited and personally committed you are to the goals, they’ll be more likely to take ownership and put in the effort required to make their goals a reality. The following tips can strengthen your team’s alignment:

1 EMPHASIZE CORE VALUES. Remind your team exactly where the organization is coming from and where it needs to go. Help them tie the mission/vision to the tasks they complete every day, since often this isn’t apparent.

What happens when an organization loses track of its core values? Anything from a minor stumble to a complete meltdown. Back in 2001, energy company Enron self-destructed in a scandal that still amazes those who witnessed it. Despite the core values literally carved into the façade of its Houston headquarters—Respect, Integrity, Communication, and Excellence—top executives focused on feathering their own nests and defrauding stakeholders to the tune of billions of dollars.

2 EMPHASIZE BOTH INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND TEAM EFFORT. I can’t say it often enough: if you want to engage and empower your employees, tell each of them why their work matters and how it moves the organization forward. Otherwise, why should they ever look beyond the next paycheck? That said, you increase your productivity by an order of magnitude if everyone interlocks as a solid team.

Where do your team members feel lost? Where is more training needed? Encourage your team members to examine their daily work and help them fill in the blanks where they can’t translate goals into operations. Urge them to ask for what they need to be more valuable to the marketplace, the organization, and the team.

3 FOCUS ON A FEW MAJOR GOALS. Rather than dividing your attention between twenty goals and doing none of them well, pick one to three goals and execute them brilliantly. Multitasking works no better for team achievement than it does for individual productivity; you’re better off single-tasking in a fierce, focused way.

Break big goals into manageable pieces. This keeps more complex goals from overwhelming your team. Each subgoal builds on the previous one, right up the ladder.

4 CELEBRATE WHEN YOU ACHIEVE A GOAL....

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
162656566X
ISBN 13 
9781626565661
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
256
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