20

Eight implementation habits

ROBIN SPECULAND

Perpetual transformation requires organizations to have embedded eight key implementation habits.

Most of us start out with the right intentions when launching a new strategy, but somewhere between thought and action, we lose commitment. This happens for a number of reasons, such as being distracted by running the day-to-day business, or a new threat from the competition or geopolitical activities. Top performing organizations in perpetual transformation have embedded key implementation habits.

In the last few years, in strategy implementation, we have rapidly moved from acquiring awareness to needing knowledge to developing behaviors. This has been partly driven by the fact that the average strategy life cycle is now just three years, which means implementation is happening more frequently than ever before, and the skills to implement are more in demand.

Awareness in strategy implementation was ignited with a seminal Fortune article in June 1999, “Why CEOs Fail.” Ram Charan and Geoff Colvin argued that the high strategy implementation failure rate was due to bad execution, not bad strategy. In 2002, they published Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, and I published Bricks to Bridges — Make Your Strategy Come Alive in 2004. These books contributed to strategy implementation being recognized as its own field. (Note: “implementation” and “execution” are synonymous.) The books stressed that leaders need both the ability to craft the right strategy and the skill to implement it. In a 2015 HBR article¹¹⁸ Leinwand, Mainardi and Kleiner revealed that, “Only 8% of Leaders Are Good at Both Strategy and Execution.”

This massive gap between the ability to both craft and execute a strategy has evolved because leaders had been taught how to plan and not how to execute. The quest for knowledge about strategy implementation then saw a flurry of activity as leaders focused on improving the high rate of strategy implementation failures.

Today, strategy implementation has evolved and is focusing more on behavior. Leaders are now demanding consistency in the organization’s ability to implement the strategy, what they call perpetual transformation. As Charan and Colvin said: “It’s fascinating to watch what happens when a CEO who executes well brings these habits into a company where they didn’t exist.”

But, somewhere between planning the strategy and taking action to implement it, leaders typically lose their way. What is missing? The discipline to do what needs to be done and make implementation a positive habit.

It’s critical in today’s accelerated pace of business, with shortened strategy life cycles and the strain many leaders feel from turbulent markets, reduced working capital and board pressure to deliver right the first time. That’s why implementation needs to become a habit.

Customers notice your implementation not your strategy

Much of the published literature to date still examines why implementation frequently fails rather than how to create a culture of perpetual transformation.

This article introduces, for the first time, eight implementation habits that have evolved from more than 20 years of research, client work and five books I’ve written on the topic. The habits are:

1. Discipline

2. Right Actions

3. Measure Everything

4. 90-day Chunks

5. Less is More

6. Nurture Communications

7. Culture of Accountability

8. Review Rhythm

Habit #1: Discipline

Implementation success requires ongoing discipline across an organization. There are no shortcuts. Discipline acts as the bridge across the turbulent sea of strategy implementation, propelling movement from thought to performance. As General H. Norman Schwarzkopf said: “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”

Embedding discipline is not easy. Consider that an estimated 40 percent of physicians are overweight and 44 percent of them smoke! Those paid to advocate healthy living don’t appear to have the discipline to do what they know is right.

Changing strategy means changing how employees work. But getting them to do things differently does not result from a one-time town hall meeting announcing a new strategy. Rather, it requires leaders to provide constant daily support, reinforcement and encouragement to take new actions. Many leaders lack the discipline required to make this happen.

Like training for a marathon or becoming fit in the gym, action must become a daily discipline.

As a rule of thumb, adopt the discipline of practicing implementation habits by structuring it into the business. For example, I was working with a client in the Middle East, whose leadership team did not have the discipline to regularly review the implementation as they were always caught up with the day-to-day running of the business. To ensure the leaders adopted the discipline of regular reviews, so that they could take corrective action when required, the CEO established a separate leadership review meeting every two weeks. After eight months, this meeting was then absorbed into the regular leadership meeting as the leaders had adopted discipline of constantly reviewing and taking corrective action for the implementation of the strategy.

Review is just one of the eight areas required for excellence in execution.

Implementation Compass™

In Bricks to Bridges — Make Your Strategy Come Alive, I published the Implementation Compass™ — a framework of the eight areas required for excellence in execution. Organizations succeeding in their strategy implementation practiced these eight areas:

(1) North: People — It’s people who implement the strategy, not leaders. Leaders are responsible for ensuring the organization has the right caliber of people with the right skills.

(2) North-East: Biz Case — This explains why the organization must change strategies and create a sense of urgency around the required transformation.

(3) East: Communication — It’s not only about creating initial fanfare but nurturing the communication by sharing customer feedback and informing employees what’s going on, what’s working, what’s not working and what lessons are being learned.

(4) South-East: Measurement — A change in strategy requires a change in measurement. Leaders need to create the new measures that track the implementation and identify where to take corrective action.

(5) South: Culture — Culture drives the way the strategy is implemented. Two organizations can have the same strategy, but how they implement it is driven by their culture.

(6) South-West: Process — Processes need to be continually improved with employees empowered to change the way they are working.

(7) West: Reinforce — When employees step up and take the right actions, they have to be encouraged; otherwise, they will stop taking those right actions.

(8) North-West: Regular Reviews — Many leaders check on strategy implementation only once or twice a year. Frequent monitoring is critical as it reinforces the importance of the implementation and identifies where to take corrective action.

The Implementation Compass™ guides leaders through their implementation journey, identifying the right actions to take and drives the required discipline.

Habit #2: Right Actions

Changing your strategy, by default, means you’re asking your employees to take different actions. Our research (Bridges Business Consultancy Int¹¹⁹) reveals that only 5 percent of employees know their organization strategy and only 12 percent of that group know the right actions to take.

Unfortunately too many strategy implementation launches do not clearly articulate to employees how the new strategy relates to them and specifically the right actions they can take to participate in the implementation.

With the launch of the new strategy, leaders are asking employees to do “more work,” when many already have too much to do. The employees are already busy and now their leaders are asking them to do more! Leaders are responsible for encouraging and enabling employees to participate in the implementation and to make that participation as easy as possible.

One of the ways this can be achieved is to create a “To Stop” list. This identifies current actions in the organization that do not apply to the new strategy and need to be prevented. On the list, for example, might be eliminating old products or reports or a specific market segment.

The “To Stop” list creates the space, time and resources to focus on taking the right actions by eliminating non-value-adding actions.

My rule of thumb rule here is to come up with twice as many actions to stop as to start, so as to create the space to take the right actions. You will not always achieve this, but simply by aiming to do so assists in identifying actions to stop, as this is not a normal habit among leaders.

Once you have identified the right actions to take and eliminated the actions to stop, a powerful proven best practice is to allow employees to choose which of the right actions they want to take. This is because people are more committed to outcomes they set themselves by a ratio of almost five to one, as noted by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller of McKinsey.¹²⁰

Aiken and Keller cite a famous behavioral experiment in which half the participants are randomly assigned a lottery ticket number while the others are asked to write down any number they want on a blank ticket. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offer to buy back the tickets from their holders. The result: no matter what geography or demographic environment, researchers found they had to pay at least five times more to those who came up with their own number. Why? Because people are more dedicated to outcomes they set themselves.

This can be put into practice by, for example, offering people a choice of which design thinking team they’d like to participate on. Ask: “Would you prefer to be on the design thinking team for onboarding new customers or one for improving the efficiency of our key product?”

The rule of thumb here is that small actions by lots of people equal big transformation. The aim for leaders is to explain and encourage employees to take the right actions.

Habit #3: Measure Everything

Measures drive the right actions, yet some leaders do not change their measures when they change their strategy. By default, they keep measuring the old strategy!

My rule of thumb here is: change your strategy, change your measures.

Without the right measures in place:

• You won’t know where you are along your implementation journey.
• You don’t know which direction you are heading.
• People become confused when they’re told one thing but measured against something else. When this occurs, they will continue to take actions based on achieving the old measures, not the new ones.
• You can’t accurately show progress made from the baseline data to the targets.
• You don’t know how your implementation is performing and therefore can’t take corrective action.

A strategy scorecard is an exceptional tool for measuring and managing strategy and using it needs to become a habit in the organization. An effective strategy scorecard:

• Enhances leaders’ understanding of the strategy across different business lines through discussions when the scorecard is created.
• Provides greater clarity about the strategy — what’s important and what isn’t.
• Allows leaders to speak with greater consistency in their messaging through a strategy story.
• Demonstrates both the importance of and commitment to the new strategy.

The following model I developed assists leaders in transitioning from vision to performance.

© Bridges Business Consultancy

The vision is the future state of the organization. The mission is its core purpose. The values are its guiding principles. The strategy is the detailed plan on differentiating yourself from your competitors and addressing how to achieve the vision. Strategy objectives further translate the strategy. Every strategy objective has at least one measure; every measure has an identified baseline and target attached to at least one action on how targets will be achieved. Individuals are held accountable for the actions they own. These actions are constantly reviewed to ensure the organization is on the right path toward the vision and delivering the expected performance.

It should be noted that of the eight areas highlighted in the above Implementation Compass, the area that receives the most resistance is “Measures.” This is because poor performing organizations track employee performance once a year. With the introduction of a strategy scorecard leaders are able to track not annually, quarterly, monthly, or even weekly but daily. This creates a pushback from employees that can be the downfall of many and adoption of a strategy scorecard.

Habit #4: 90-day Chunks

In any transformation, early wins are required to build momentum and traction.

My rule of thumb here is to plan to take action in 90-day chunks. By consciously ensuring the actions can be completed within a 90-day period, leaders make the actions more manageable and they gain early traction.

180 days, for example, is too long as many people don’t take the action until the day before they’re about to be checked! 30 days is too short, as it leads to a list of too many actions to take. 90 days is just the right amount of time.

The motto is: “Theory promises and success sells.” In this situation, the strategy is the theory, and the implementation is where success occurs by completing the right actions within 90 days. If more time is required, then the actions are divided into segments that can be completed within 90 days.

Habit #5: Less is More

Launching a strategy, as stated above means “more work” for employees, because they must continue running the current business while starting to implement the new strategy. Focusing on doing more, not less, has been the downfall of many strategy implementations.

When an organization launch has too many strategic objectives simultaneously, it can cause confusion about what’s important, dilute resources and be detrimental to performance.

Carrefour’s former CEO, Lars Olufsen, for example, took over the organization in 2009 and launched seven retail strategies including agility, customer engagement, innovation, and global expansion. What resulted from launching too many strategies simultaneously? Confusion across the organization, loss of domestic market share and a 53 percent plunge in share price in one year. Olufsen stepped down in 2012.

Compare this to Angela Ahrendts who joined Burberry as CEO in 2006. She announced five strategic priorities including intensifying non-apparel sales, accelerating retail-led growth and investing in underpenetrated markets. She stuck with these priorities for seven years, updating employees and investors regularly on progress against each goal. This reinforced the strategic message and the company’s commitment to achieving those objectives. During this period, Burberry’s share price handily outperformed competitors and the broader market.

My rule of thumb here is to focus on only three to five strategic initiatives within a 12-month period.

An experiment by Sheena S. Iyengar (Columbia University) and Mark R. Lepper (Stanford University) explains how less really is more.¹²¹ They cite the Jam Experiment. It involved an upscale grocery store displaying, on one occasion, 24 jams for customers to view and purchase and, on the other occasion, only six different jams. Of the customers who visited the 24-jam selection, only 3 percent purchased. From the six-jam selection, 30 percent of the customers purchased — a 10-fold increase. This experiment also tested for choices of chocolate. Once again, the group being offered only six choices reported a higher level of satisfaction and made more sales than those offering more than six choices.

These conclusions indicate that leaders who promote three to five strategy objectives in 12 months realize greater achievements than those focused on many more. When organizations try to implement more than 10 objectives, less gets done and, in some cases, none of the objectives are completed.

When people feel overwhelmed, they do a little work on everything and finish nothing.

Habit #6: Nurture Communication

Every four years since 2000, my company, Bridges, has researched the state of strategy implementation.¹²² In every research result, “poor communication” was among the top three reasons why strategy implementation fails. Even though leaders know communication is critical, they still lack the discipline to do it. For example, astonishingly, in many organizations, communication about the strategy is almost nonexistent six months after the launch. Communication often reverts to “business as usual,” yet a wealth of communication needs to be shared, including:

• Progress against strategy objectives: This keeps employees informed on how the organization is performing.
• What’s working and what’s not: This creates a learning environment in which successes can be replicated and failures can be eliminated.
• Customer feedback: Listening to the voices of customers includes gathering their feedback on the strategy and sharing its implications.
• Progress against the metrics: This provides updates of the implementation analytics.
• Share success stories: This keeps employees engaged and encourages them to participate and take the right actions.
• Work improvements: This requires sharing how employees are changing the way they work.
• Milestones achieved: This celebrates successes.
• Strategy deviations: This explains any corrective action taken during the implementation and explains why.
• Lessons learned: This provides the opportunity for employees from different business verticals to share relevant experiences and lessons learned.

The rule of thumb here is to nurture communication throughout the whole implementation journey.

Habit #7: Culture of Accountability

When striving to achieve perpetual transformation, adopting accountability is essential. It requires holding someone responsible, with the emphasis on one. Leaders need to hold their direct reports regularly accountable, but they don’t. This is frustrating as a culture of accountability is one of the easiest habits to adopt but one of the least practiced.

In Bob Proctor’s book It’s Not About The Money,¹²³ he notes how people who say, “that’s a good idea” only had a 10 percent chance of making a change. Those who set a specific plan of how to do it had a 50 percent chance of making a change. But those who set a specific time to share their progress with someone else had a 95 percent chance of making a change. To set employees up for success with a 95 percent chance of making a change, take these six steps to help create a culture of accountability:

1. Know the organization’s core values: The values act as guiding principles of what is important and acceptable.

2. Clarify expectations: People need to know how they’re expected to perform and what they’re expected to deliver before they can be held accountable. For example, does accountability mean attending meetings on time and/or submitting reports on time and/or checking that the right actions have been taken?

3. Adopt measures: Putting in place the right measures allows you to track performance, show what is important, and hold people accountable.

4. Assign one person: Don’t have more than one person responsible because that eradicates the accountability.

5. Conduct reviews: People need to know they will regularly be asked how they did against the planned actions.

6. Link actions to consequences: People have to be recognized in a positive way when they take the right actions. There also needs to be negative consequences for inertia or the wrong actions, and the consequences must align with the values.

“The single most important change in actions that needs to occur during a time of cultural transition is the shift to greater accountability,” say Roger Connors and Tom Smith in The Oz Principle.¹²⁴ And a survey of 161 companies by McKinsey & Company revealed that the number one best practice of agile organizations is role clarity, because it leads to greater accountability.¹²⁵

The rule of thumb here is to let your employees know when you are going to hold them accountable and then do it.

Habit #8: Review Rhythm

Bridges’ research¹²⁶ revealed that 85 percent of organizations spend less than 10 hours a month discussing their strategy implementation. In some organizations, it’s only reviewed once or twice a year as leaders get distracted by other activities. When leaders become distracted from the strategy implementation, so do their people.

Successful implementation requires regular reviews. This establishes in the organization a review rhythm — a pattern and expectation that progress is checked. Leaders are responsible for conducting regular implementation reviews and making them a habit across the organization. How?

1. Every week, leaders ensure employees are asked by their immediate boss how they have contributed to the strategy implementation and identify where they need support and/or guidance.

2. Every two weeks, leaders review the strategy implementation performance within their own business vertical.

3. Every 12 weeks, the CEO conducts a quarterly review for the whole organization.

4. Every 52 weeks, leaders step back to reflect on the methodology and where it can be improved.

During the review , it is critical that the right questions are asked, for the answers will dramatically affect the actions taken by employees and the success of the implementation.

In Atomic Habit, James Clear wrote: “If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses and see how your daily choices will compound 10 to 20 years down the line.”¹²⁷ This is as true for organizations as it is for people.

To know where your organization could end up, ensure these eight implementation habits become a daily discipline on your journey to perpetual transformation.

About the author

Robin Speculand is a pioneer and expert in strategy and digital implementation. He is driven to transform strategy implementation globally by inspiring leaders to adopt a different mindset and approach. The founder of three organizations and three business associations, Robin is CEO of Bridges Business Consultancy Int and co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the Ticking Clock Guys. Robin is also a TEDx presenter and facilitator for IMD, Duke CE and Singapore Management University, and a prolific bestselling author. He recently authored World’s Best Bank: A Strategic Guide to Digital Transformation.

Footnotes

118   https://hbr.org/2015/12/only-8-of-leaders-are-good-at-both-strategy-and-execution

119   www.bridgesconsultancy.com/research-case-study/research

120   www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-irrational-side-of- change-management

121   https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11138768/

122   www.bridgesconsultancy.com/research-case-study/research/

123   www.amazon.com/Its-Not-About-Money-Bob-Proctor-audiobook/dp/B001U5P7CA/ ref=sr_1_1dchild=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwj8e JBhA5EiwAg3z0mwxm XGaYbny0Uuk4EMUmph VWAargtnL9I BYbM6T9AByP5A dqop6FpRo CaeYQAvD_BwE&keywords=it%27s+ not+ about +the+money+bob+proctor&qid=1630710323&sr=8-1

124   https://www.amazon.com/Oz-Principle-Individual-Organizational-Accountability-ebook /dp/B0012M2IX2

125   www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-five-trademarks-of- agile-organizations

126   www.bridgesconsultancy.com/research-case-study/research/

127   https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits