Sherpa Alliance

Firstly, it’s about recognizing and teaching Execution Excellence as a system and a discipline.  If an executive team is still working within a mental model of “execution” as detailed planning, tactics and dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s, then you are fighting a losing battle.  They will continue to experience constant white-water, which will be the mother of all excuses for not doing what they said they would do and meeting their commitments.

Secondly, it’s about using an approach (Breakthrough Programs & Hybrid Programs) and tools (Jumpstart Your Journey) which create a good sense of “strategic productivity”, as a sustaining process, cycle and discipline.  When executives sense that the approach is productive in progressing strategic work products, they will look forward to the next session and engage with greater commitment in contributing to traction.  When they feel the approach, process and tools are unproductive and  wasting of their time, to some degree, they will loathe the next session and do the minimum they think they can get away with.

Thirdly, it’s about tapping into the power of peer-pressure by creating and reinforcing the expectation that everyone will want to be impressed with the progress each executive presents at the next review session and, not just the ownership, but the pride-of-ownership, they exhibit in doing so.  It’s always very interesting and illuminating – there is nothing like this process to show you who’s who around your executive table.  The Traction Plan is a key tool in in providing the "strategic productivity" and "peer-pressure" we need - leveraging the power of a visual tool to master detail complexity and dynamic complexity, this tool helps us crystallize the elegant simplicity of an executable plan, which is monitored and evolved on an ongoing and dynamic basis, mobilizing our team.

I once facilitated a breakthrough program with a very successful entrepreneurial company, run by a husband and wife team who were increasingly concerned about their growing organization’s ability to execute - the wife brought me in against the better judgment of the husband.  In the first meeting, when I was outlining the challenge of Execution Excellence as a system and a discipline he said, “you don’t understand entrepreneurial businesses like this, we just need our executives to be more accountable”.  The word “just” is a tell-tale sign of stupid simplicity (Simplicity & Complexity).  When I asked how he planned to do that, there was no real answer.  He had been a stock broker in a previous phase of his career, so I said that was the equivalent of a strategy to make more money by just “buying lower and selling higher”.  There’s just a small matter of “how?”!  The “how?” of getting an executive team to fully execute what it commits to is complicated, demanding the structure of an “architecture of execution”.  6 months later, in one of our team sessions, the husband shared with everyone that he had “had an epiphany and realized we need more structure in this business”.  Breakthrough!