It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do: How Following Through At Every Level Can Make Or Break Your Company - Hardcover

Haughton, Laurence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385510411 ISBN 13: 9780385510417

Publisher: Crown Business, 2004

Synopsis

Good managers at every level recognize the importance of strategic planning and setting concrete goals for their employees. But even the best among them often fail to implement and support the crucial processes that turn well-laid plans into visible successes. Studies show that over the last fifty years, a whopping 83 percent of corporate slowdowns were attributable not to outside economic forces but to the lack of vigilant follow-through within the company itself.
In IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SAY...IT'S WHAT YOU DO, Laurence Haughton identifies the missteps that allow initiatives to fall through the cracks and explains how to close the gap between what a company sets out to do and what actually happens. Drawing on interviews with top-level executives from such companies as IKEA, The Wall Street Journal, Charles Schwab, Time Warner, Watson Wyatt, and Pella Corp., and scores of entrepreneurs covering every industry, he presents the essential strategies for ensuring the success of innovations and change, including:

· Get more “buy-in” from employees on new initiativse
· Balance control with coordination to make your team more effective
· Make sure that expectations are crystal clear
· Maintain a sense of urgency and momentum on a daily basis

Filled with real-life examples of how effective follow-through stems the waste of resources, improves productivity, and prevents costly mistakes, IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SAY...IT'S WHAT YOU DO gives managers the tools they need to eliminate self-generated failure and achieve their goals.

About this title

About the Author

LAURENCE HAUGHTON, former producer for ABC radio and coauthor of the acclaimed bestseller It's Not the Big That Eat the Small . . . It's the Fast That Eat the Slow, is a management consultant with more than twenty years of frontline experience in the manufacturing, retail, media, and service industries. A resident of Greenbrae, California, he conducts workshops on revenue growth and management follow-through both here and abroad.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Building Block I

CLEAR DIRECTION

Does every employee understand where your business is going?

Are the steps necessary to reach each goal plain to see? Is there a good line of sight between your company’s mission and what your people do?

Finally, does your team support the direction of the business?

Forty-eight percent of the 12,000-plus top executives, middle managers, and front-line employees surveyed for WorkUSA 2002– Watson Wyatt’s annual research report on employee attitudes– could not honestly answer yes when asked those questions.

If Wyatt’s research report accurately reflects the American workplace, almost half of all employees feel they are working without a sense of clear direction. No wonder it’s so tough to make sure what’s expected gets done. It’s the simplest of all business calculations–if people don’t understand precisely where they are headed, it’s only sheer luck that will get them to where they need to be.

This failure to create a clear sense of direction is not from a lack of trying. “We work longer and harder now than ever before on making our messages [about strategy and direction] connect,” a vice president from a major financial services firm said. “Truth be told, however, we still probably miss half of the time . . . or at least it feels that way to many out and away from command central.”

Why? Providing a clear direction these days is difficult.

· People are vague.
Customers, coworkers, investors, and even many top corporate executives–the very people who insist that your business unit follows through and meets all their expectations–are often unclear, contradictory, and inconsistent.

· Time is short.
Over three-quarters of all managers are making more decisions per day than they were in 1997. But only 15 percent of those managers have been given any extra “think” time.

· Processes are flawed.
Two-thirds of all day-to-day directional issues–about new products, staffing, policy changes, price increases, etc.–are determined using decision processes prone to fail.

In the next three chapters, you’ll learn what to do to overcome these obstacles and consistently give your associates a clear direction.

First, in “Clear Expectations,” I’ll offer a prescription for how to turn vague, general, or conflicting expectations into clear, specific, and coordinated targets–even if you’re the manager stuck in the middle between headquarters, staff, and customers.

Next, in “Read Between the Lines,” I’ll show you how to quickly connect the dots between what people say and what they really want, without them telling you in an overt or explicit manner.

Finally, in “More Accurate Assessments,” we’ll hammer out a system for thinking things through more thoroughly (even under tight deadlines) and fine-tuning your directions with tactics prone to succeed.

1
CLEAR EXPECTATIONS

One day, executives at a multinational company presented their annual operating plans (AOPs) and budgets to the top brass. The CEO then followed up with a critique of their plans and a list of his expectations for the upcoming year. Here are some excerpts:*

· “We need an ambitious plan for productivity that overachieves the target.”

· “Our quality problems are disturbing. Continue to work to improve quality.”

· “Good work on reducing past-due shipments. However, past-dues are still among the highest in the company, so opportunity remains.”

· “Cost reduction is a big opportunity for you. One point of cost will take you from an uncomfortable position to a comfortable one.”

· “[For next year] build a plan that allows you to react to different scenarios, given the high level of economic uncertainty.”

The memo went on like that for seventeen bulleted points. A few focused on products: “We need to drive better results out of product line Z”; a few on people: “Work with executive A to crisp up your plans”; and the remaining ones on company initiatives: “Put more focus on Six Sigma.” The CEO concluded with a thank-you: “Overall, you had a great AOP presentation last week.” He suggested the executives meet with him in ten days to “discuss the specifics of how we will achieve [each of the] targets.”

The author of that memo is Larry Bossidy, the former CEO of Allied-Signal and one of the best of the best CEOs. Bossidy knows a lot about getting things done, a skill he’s demonstrated many times at Allied-Signal and through his best-selling book Execution. Undoubtedly, Bossidy wrote this memo to make sure each manager clearly understood what he expected so their follow-through would be flawless.

But does his memo really spell out just what’s expected?

Linda Lockwood ofCharles Schwab and Company, Inc., reviewed the excerpts and asked herself that critical question. Lockwood is a vice president and chief of staff at Schwab. In her fourteen years in financial services, Lockwood has also built a great reputation for getting things done–and in the last few years she’s worked especially hard on the skills and disciplines for starting every initiative with crystal-clear expectations.

“No,” Lockwood said. “I would say most managers would look at this and quickly dismiss it as the same old corporate gobbledygook.”

Specifically:

· Our quality problems are disturbing. Continue to work to improve quality. “Where’s the bar?” Lockwood asks, wondering how any manager could tell when they had achieved his objective. “And what’s the connection between quality problems and the preceding directive, ‘We need an ambitious plan for productivity that overachieves the target’? Could productivity and these ‘disturbing’ quality problems be connected?” she added. “I wonder how thoughtfully each of these goals was integrated?”

· Good work on past-due shipments. However . . . opportunity remains. “This is a completely mixed message,” according to Lockwood. “An employee reading this would feel momentarily good, then bad and then confused–never knowing exactly what was expected.”

· One point of cost will take you from an uncomfortable position to a comfortable one. “This one is hilarious! A comfortable point for me is on a sailboat leading the pack,” she said with a smile. “Seriously, uncomfortable is subjective. The reader would have no idea how to measure the specific outcome.”

Call them goals, targets, objectives, key results areas, it doesn’t matter; management’s expectations must be like a lighthouse, a bright and focused beacon that guides the team’s follow-through, signaling which direction to head in. If those expectations are vague, confusing, or incompatible (“corporate gobbledygook” in Lockwood’s words), the next level of managers and their associates are more likely to make the wrong turns at critical junctions or simply, in bewilderment, stop following through.

In this chapter, you’ll learn the essential disciplines for starting with clear expectations. Moreover, I’ll show you how you can take a boss’s vague, general, or conflicting directives and make them clear and focused.

THE PRESCRIPTION

Lockwood has seen many vague, general, and conflicting directives over the years in her company. That’s what motivated her and others at Schwab to develop a prescription for making sure that expectations are clear and capable of guiding follow-through.

First, Lockwood said, “Each goal needs a crisp, measurable definition of success with a timetable and point person or department responsible for the follow-through.” It’s not good enough to give people fuzzy or universal pronouncements like “we need to improve customer satisfaction.” Satisfaction must be deconstructed into all the little pieces that add up to a satisfied customer, and then each element must be made measurable.

Second, “The manager needs to look over what is expected to weed out conflicts between one objective and the next. For example, if the team sets ‘ambitious plans for productivity,’” Lockwood asked, “can they also be nimble reacting to different scenarios?”

The best way to discover if these two goals conflict is for the manager and the team to brainstorm all the ways they might improve productivity and what it takes to be nimble. Then the manager and some coworkers should imagine where the two goals might clash.

For example, one answer for greater productivity might be to cut the cost of production by using the least experienced (and therefore lowest-paid) person to do a job. But being nimble may require that someone with higher skills (and a higher salary)–such as the ability to improvise or to anticipate different scenarios–should do the work. Maximum productivity could conflict with maximum agility.

“If two expectations clash,” Lockwood has learned, “then priorities must be clarified and set.” Finally, Lockwood concluded, “Every expectation needs check points embedded in the goal to make sure things are getting done, and if not, to give the team a chance to adjust before time expires.”

Lockwood’s common sense approach to starting with clear expectations isn’t news. For years, experts in goal setting have suggested managers use the acronym SMART as a checklist for issuing cleare...

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385510411
• ISBN 13: 9780385510417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256