There is a saying that ‘no plan survives engagement with the enemy’. Even with a unique solution supported by an exceptional strategy, businesses executing their strategy find that the market, customers, employees, suppliers, and competitors throw up countless challenges largely outside the control of the organization. The lack of control over so many variables makes the execution stage of business problem-solving incredibly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Since economists Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus developed the concept of VUCA in 1985, the world and business landscape has become exponentially more so.
When they designed the ‘Balanced Scorecard’ for strategy execution in 1992, Harvard Business School Professors Robert Kaplan and David Norton found that 90 percent of organizations struggled to execute their strategies successfully. Over the last few decades, strategy execution and the concept of VUCA have filled millions of pages of leadership and business journals, and there would rarely be a week when a major publication doesn’t feature research focused on strategy execution. There are thousands of ideas on ways to overcome the execution challenge, but there’s no silver bullet, and it’s not getting any easier as things get more complex by the day. What almost everyone agrees on is one thing: leadership makes a difference.
While there is a broad consensus that leadership can be the difference between success and failure, what is less understood is the psychology behind how leaders impact the people they rely on to execute their strategy. While automation, technology, and AI have created efficiencies, most businesses still rely on people for the two critical elements of execution – planning and performance. Because individuals and teams are the most complex systems a business needs to manage, leaders must be exceptional at creating focus, alignment, and disciplined ways of working. Where people are involved, execution will fail when there is poor psychological safety to enable people to plan and perform. While leaders can’t control VUCA, they can manage ASCA – the Anxiety, Stimulation, Conformity, and Ambiguity levels of their teams. If people are anxious and unclear on what actions to take, poorly energized, and afraid to speak up when things aren’t working, then failure is a foregone conclusion.
For individuals and teams to be exceptional at planning they must be clear on the objectives and targets for execution inputs and outputs, and shape this into a plan to create clarity on what will be done, who will do it, how it will be done, and where, when and how often things will happen. Performing (activating the solution) requires people with the skills and experience to execute the plan in an effective and timely manner, then monitor and adjust it to ensure alternative actions are taken to keep the process moving if things don’t go to plan. All of this must be supported by the right leadership so people can function at the highest level.
Nobody plans to fail
There is a saying that ‘nobody plans to fail, they just fail to plan’ - this sounds simple, but understates how complicated planning can be even in small and uncomplicated organizations. Planning is the setting of objectives and targets for inputs and outputs. Input planning relates to the quantity, type, and quality of activity, time, money, raw materials, people, and other resources required to execute the solution. Output planning involves the development of some form of ‘balanced scorecard’ that captures relevant success metrics such as revenue, profit, market share, customer acquisition and satisfaction, employee engagement, and risk tolerance, to name a few.
And if that sounds complex, just wait! The required inputs and outputs must be shaped into a plan, but often the plan to solve one problem interferes with the plan to solve a different problem. A business may have projects underway that draw time, money, or resources that make them unavailable for other projects. Additionally, the business may need to create multiple plans based on predicted changes to market conditions, customer confidence, and supply-chain dynamics. If the plan involves another team, has it been checked that the assumptions are the same by both teams? Even the most diligent problem solvers can miss things in the planning stage – a classic example is when NASA failed to notice one team was working in metric and the other in imperial measurements. All of this requires consideration when formulating the plan.
Psychosocial risk factors, such as ambiguity, anxiety, and conformity, pose significant challenges during the planning stage. Clarity of the plan is critical for coordinating execution; if the plan is ambiguous, things are likely to become messy. If people are anxious about aspects of the plan, whether it’s a deadline, the results required, or their capability to execute their part, then they will spend time worrying about imagined events and consequences rather than focusing on executing the plan. Conformity is another critical risk because ‘false alignment’ – people saying they agree when they really don’t - can lead to wildly uncoordinated execution.
The plan is always at risk if people feel pressured to say “yes” when they know full well it won’t be done or cannot be done in the timeframe. Not only does this create delays, but it lowers belief in the plan and can snowball into disengagement that puts the whole project at risk. Effective leaders ensure the plan is clearly communicated, eliminate unnecessary worry by ensuring the team gets regular updates on how the plan is progressing, and encourage the team to challenge and debate aspects of the plan so it is continuously refined.
Performing under pressure
Once the plan is set, the next part is where the ‘rubber hits the road’ - performing. Performing requires the right skills and experience to be applied and actioned in a timely and coordinated manner. Performance also needs monitoring to ensure that if, or more likely when, it does not go to plan something can be done to keep the project moving forward. As no plan survives contact with the enemy, it is likely a ‘Plan B’ may have been designed, but the business may need to modify the plan and pivot to a yet-to-be-defined ‘Plan C’. Flexibility and adaptability must be part of the knowledge and experience planned and applied, as the ability to modify on the fly is often essential for a business to successfully deliver the solution.
Again, the ASCA psychosocial risk factors of stimulation, anxiety, ambiguity, and conformity can put optimal performance in jeopardy. If the team is overly stimulated or anxious, they may be distracted and fail to perform under pressure - even though they ‘know-how’ they fail to ‘do’ the tasks to the required level or in the right timeframe. Conformity and ambiguity pose the same risk for different reasons – they leave the leaders and the team with no accurate feedback on whether performance is in line with expectations, which means the people don’t know if the tasks they’re performing need adjustment. Leaders must create the right ‘flow’ state for individuals to perform. They must clearly communicate to lower ambiguity and eliminate excessive worry within the team. It is also critical that they encourage the team to speak up and speak out when things aren’t working.
How leaders help and hinder execution excellence
The executing stage of problem-solving is at risk from a multitude of external VUCA ‘enemies’ that can derail planning and performance but are largely outside the organization’s control. However, many businesses fail to measure and manage the bigger risk that lies within the organization - leaders who fail to recognize and manage the team’s ASCA – Anxiety, Stimulation, Conformity, and Ambiguity. Many leaders underestimate the impact of these psychosocial risk factors and, in fact, amplify them as they drive for results. It’s not uncommon for leaders to become focused on doing ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve the result, regardless of the impact on people. While this intense focus might reduce the anxiety of the board and executive team, it is likely to create more problems than it solves by amplifying psychosocial risk factors in individuals and teams who are pushed and pressured to perform or suffer the consequences. While this might deliver short-term results, it feeds a compounding cycle of over-stimulation, anxiety, ambiguity, and conformity that manifests in a toxic culture with declining long-term fortunes.
For a team to truly be a high-performing team and function at an optimal level, leaders must possess the personality to not only drive results but also do so in a way that doesn’t burn people out. The modern leader needs to be socially aware and protect the psychosocial safety of their team – minimizing their anxiety and ambiguity, creating the right stimulation and energy, and ensuring low levels of conformity so people collaborate and feel free to innovate, not just follow the leader. The leader’s ability to keep people focused, aligned, and executing consistently is what enables companies to translate good strategy into great results.
To gain a genuine competitive advantage in strategy execution, organizations must measure how capable their leaders are of unlocking the planning and performance potential of their people. To find out more and measure the problem-solving potential of your leaders and their impact on the psychosocial safety of their teams, check out the science behind The GreyScale Leadership Assessment tool and find helpful resources at http://tgsleadership.com
