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Business Strategy Part 4: Habit & Execution - Your Dynamic Duo

by Eileen Ashmore, MBA
of E.M. ASHMORE & ASSOCIATES INC.

We have discussed the elements and essence of your business strategy so that you build a business strategy robust enough to move your firm forward. Now, as you complete your business planning, you'll be considering your execution strategy. Just like New Year's resolutions, the execution strategy may fall by the wayside a couple of months down the road if an execution plan has not been established. In the book 'Execution, The Discipline of Getting Things Done', Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan said it best when they said "Putting an execution environment in place is hard, but losing it is easy!".

Execution is about forming the habit of accountability with your team and your employees. It is a habit of doing 7 things:

1. Maintaining your focus on your business strategy each day for how you will attain your long term and short term goals.
2. Following through on annual goals by building a realistic, doable action plan that indicates how the goal will be achieved, by whom and by what time.
3. Communicating these goals within your organization and with your advisors so that it is not derailed as some point during the year because someone had not bought into the business strategy, goals, action plan or execution process.
4. Tracking results to ensure that your action plans are working to sustain and grow your firm.
5. Reviewing your goals with your management team each month.
6. Reviewing your goals in more depth each quarter with your management team by indicating the status of goal attainment - 10%, 25% or 30%, etc.
7. Correcting as needed to address new opportunities and/or obstacles for attaining your goals.

Start the habit of setting review meetings on a regular basis. Your monthly review meetings could be 2 hours each month and the quarterly review meetings could be 4 hours each. If someone on your team is not available at the scheduled time, have them conference in to the meeting.

Many a leader has felt beleaguered, befuddled and confounded because he/she could not get the team focused and directed on attaining the goals of the business plan. Don't let that leader be you. Form the habit of accountability with regular review meetings. ."Motivation is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going." (Unknown) Let the habit of execution bring you more opportunities this year than ever before - it's your dynamic duo - Habit & Execution.

[Return to Business Stategey: Part 1]

by Eileen Ashmore, MBA
of E.M. ASHMORE & ASSOCIATES INC.
www.ashmore-assoc.com
(403)252-0799.
Eileen Ashmore, MBA, provides a FREE 1 hour consultation