Execute Effectively

Execute, Execute, Execute!

Leadership is responsible to drive disciplined and effective execution toward an expected outcome. When this happens, it enables the organization to exploit its known opportunities and respond to immediate threats in its markets and supply chain. It does this by imposing structural constraints on action to focus attention and channel events to meet expectations.

All rails lead to the steel mill in Butler, PA USA (2012)

All rails lead to the steel mill in Butler, PA USA. Leadership therefore enables members of the organization to efficiently coordinate their actions in the current ecosystem. These efforts bring requisite resources – such as raw materials, energy sources, human resources, and financial capital – into the organization while events remain more predictable.  These activities allow the organization to accumulate slack resources to ensure their short and medium term survival.

Leadership therefore enables members of the organization to efficiently coordinate their actions to respond to and take advantage of events that are predictable. These efforts bring requisite resources – such as raw materials, energy sources, human resources, and financial capital – into the organization to be used, repurposed or stored for later use.  They, therefore, allow the organization to accumulate slack resources to ensure their survival in the short and medium term.

Leadership Interactions that enable effectiveness include: asking people to invest more time and energy to further the organizations objectives, setting objective metrics that determine success or failure, driving accountability by using techniques such as a balanced scorecard, establishing specific targets and deliverables to align activities, and quieting voices which distract from the purpose of from getting the work done when schedules are tight.

The call to lead…

As a leader, you must drive effective execution when the opportunities and parameters are known.  To do this, you must appropriately perform two distinct leadership functions:

The first is the information using function.  To do this, your actions should model and encourage interactions among team members that are intended to use the information that has been gathered and interpreted to hold people accountable to objective outcomes and to create, evolve, and when needed eliminate, structural attractors that serve to actualize norms, focus thinking and guide behaviors.  Leadership does this in an effort to exploit present opportunities and to respond to immediate threats. By doing so, this function supports organizing structures which operate to acquire needed resources in the ecosystem and to maximize efficiency and this earn the highest possible returns.

The second is the administrative function. To do this, your actions should model and encourage interactions among team members that are intended to establish and legitimize polices, practices and other requirements that serve the organization and its members by coordinating and organizing various activities. For example, these interactions would result in setting agreed upon to targets, deliverables and timelines, following-up on commitments and action plans, and enforcing values and norms.

These functions enable the organizing system to exploit and defend opportunities in the ecosystem quickly and effectively. Leadership interactions that ensure efficacy allow the organization and its members to maintain access to requisite resources and to accumulate stocks of various types of capital: financial, human, social, knowledge, know-how, brand and political reputation.

Growing capital of these various types creates value for your organization by enabling predictable positive outcomes over the short and the medium term.

As a leader, ensuring effectiveness is an important way for you to create value for your organization.

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