Executives: narrow your focus for success

 I've been in and out of the "strategy" business for years, working as an ELT member in a startup, defining strategy, working as a strategy consultant, helping businesses develop and implement strategy, and teaching strategy in a master's program.  I find strategy fascinating, enough that I wrote a book on strategy with a friend and colleague translating military maneuver strategy to the business world.  Shameless plug!

What's interesting about executive teams is how much they want to "get the strategy right" and of course they are incented to succeed.  What's also interesting is how little many executive teams understand about the reality of writing down a strategy and the work and focus it takes to implement a strategy.  What's worse is that most executive teams attempt to assign themselves so much of the responsibility for implementing strategies that they lose sight of the key responsibilities that leadership teams should focus on:  building a culture, setting priorities and clarifying resource allocations.

So, yes, I just tried to strip down what executive leadership teams should be doing into three discrete tasks.  Just three, so a limited range, but very important and not simple.  I'm going to spend time on each of these and also discuss the common issues or complicating factors that make life on an ELT so challenging.

Setting priorities

The most critical aspect of an executive leader's job is to set priorities.  What is it that the company should do?  What should it focus on?  Where are its key differentiators?  What is important for success?  These seem like simple questions, but as companies grow, characteristics that seemed easy to define and communicate become far more difficult, and priorities get cloudy and lost in translation.  

When executives themselves have multiple priorities - grow revenue, cut costs, increase bookings, expand market share, acquire new companies, gain new partnerships - what to focus on and what to prioritize can become challenging at the ELT level, and very fuzzy and cloudy down the ranks.

As a strategy consultant, we would borrow ideas from the military, which has a mantra that people should manage no more than three people or three ideas or three priorities.  The fewer things you are focused on, the more time you can give to what's really important.  Now, if each ELT member has three priorities, you could have (on a reasonably sized ELT team) fifteen to twenty-one priorities, which are clearly too many.  Hopefully, some of these priorities overlap or are aligned and can be combined.

We always counseled our customers that an ELT should focus on no more than 5-7 big priorities (which, yes, is more than the three mentioned above), and then within a business unit or function, the same could be true, no more than 5-7 priorities within a function.

How may priorities do you have?  How aligned are the priorities you are working on to the priorities of the business?  Does what you prioritize help the company achieve its goals?  Can your teams understand the priorities and their implications?  How often are you asked to clarify actions or decisions in light of priorities?  These questions may suggest that you or your company need better clarification of priorities.

Resource Allocation

Executives have the power of the purse and should allocate resources based on their priorities.  It is also very likely that there won't be enough resources (people, time, money) to adequately fund all of the actions necessary to accomplish your priorities.  This is where 1+1 can equal three.  Good communication, creative leadership and deep commitment can generate more and better outcomes even when priorities seem to be underfunded.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, noted that there will never be enough resources to allocate to reach all of the goals that Microsoft has.  That's why the executives are highly paid - they are expected to reach those goals with the resources they've been allocated, with the realization that in many cases they don't have what's required.  

I'm going to include just a brief snippet of his talk to his team:

We’ve evaluated the portfolio, considered the opportunities and allocated our available resources to those opportunities.
That is what you have to work with. 
Your job is to manufacture success with the resources you’ve been allocated.
And yes – you have a hard job.
You only have 2 controls:​ 1) The clarity, culture, and energy you give your teams​; and  2) Resource allocation​.

Notice that he emphasizes to his team that clarity and culture are vital (clarity on strategy I described above, culture I'll discuss next) and resource allocation.  Only through excellent strategy, well communicated and executed, good resource allocation and forward-thinking management can we expect to reach our goals.

So, ask yourself:  Do we have the appropriate resources (time, people, money) allocated to each priority?  Are we asking for too much with too little support?  Are we asking people to stretch a bit, be creative, to innovate, to reach their goals?  What signals do we send based on how we allocate our resources?

Culture

Oh boy.  Culture is one of my favorite topics to write about, because it is like an ancient Norse god.  Very invisible and very powerful.  Everyone talks about culture, every company has its mission, vision and importantly, values, but these are the wallpaper of culture.  Ultimately, culture isn't what's on your slides or pithy posters in the break room.  Culture is what decisions you make, what actions you take, what you reward and what behavior you tolerate.

There are actually at least two cultures in any business:  what we indicate our culture is through publications, communications and talking points, and what we demonstrate our culture is through actions, behaviors and the things we choose to highlight and what we choose to ignore.  While the investment (resource allocation) is on the overt actions, the impact to the rest of the business is on what actions and decisions are taken, and what behaviors are incented or ignored.

So, ask yourself as an ELT member:  what do we "say" our culture is, and what is my role in reinforcing what we say our culture is?  Do our priorities and resource allocations indicate that we mean what our culture says?  Do we incent people to align to our culture, and do we tolerate actions or behaviors that do not align with what we say our culture is?  

Culture is experienced and learned from daily activities, priorities, incentives and slights.  These matter far more than executive pronouncements and mission statements.

The Take Away

So, yes, I focused on 3, count them, 3 things that should be most important to members of an ELT.
Whether you are in a startup, just growing your business by your bootstraps, or in a rapidly growing business, or in an established business, these three things are what are vital for your executive team members to focus on.

• Setting and reinforcing a very few priorities.  
• Providing the resources to the most important priorities, realizing that the needs will almost always be greater than the resources.  
• Establishing a culture by what you communicate and reinforcing the culture by what you do, what you incent and what you accept or tolerate.

After that, it's all execution.