You've made sense of your challenges and feel like the team is really performing well together. There's a clearly defined destination and you've mapped out how to get there. But you've been here before, only to lose momentum or get distracted along the way by other priorities. You know your organisation could get better at execution.
Exceptional execution starts with narrowing the focus - clearly identifying those things must be done, or nothing else you achieve really matters. You have priorities whether you like it or not. If you want to get better at execution then you need to name them and describe the behaviours that will support them.
Once the behaviours that support the priorities have been described, it's possible to design interactions that will allow the behaviours to be modelled. The kind of interactions that you need to plan for will suggest the things you need to measure.
The war room for GB 2016 Olympic for Rio was in an office in Loughborough. Panels covered a whole wall, sliding them back revealed the exact status of GB's Olympic medal offensive. Get yourself in with a chance of winning a gold medal and your name goes up on the board. The gold medal tracker board was used to display a patchwork of information, the most important of which being clearly visible, confidence of winning gold.
These are some of the frustrations we hear when plans don't stick and medals aren't won...
"We're great at strategic planning to make sense & prioritise, who doesn't love an off site? But we really struggle to maintain our enthusiasm and follow through with the plan."
"We're doing great but feel like we're chasing too many unrelated opportunities."
"We're really committed to sticking to our plans and meeting our objectives but it always seems as if there is a fire that needs putting out."
This is the most practical of our work with teams.
By this point the team we're working with has a clear understanding of their current position, where they're headed and how they plan to get there. A set of priorities and behaviours will be emerging, and we'll work to map these principles into processes and artefacts.
These might be a sales qualification processes, strategic account interaction plans, sales forecasts, product management/development plans, IP creation processes & reusable asset registers. We build the 'gold medal tracker' from principles, processes and artefacts, the framework for tracking progress measuring execution success.
We build on performance skills, using Spotlight as a framework for thinking to ensure that as the context shifts both individuals and team are able to adapt. Some mental skills might be introduced to build the confidence & resilience needed to stay the course.
