Strategic Discipline Blog

“You cannot manage other people unless you manage yourself first” ~ Peter Drucker

What do you need to manage yourself?

Clarity on your accountabilities.

What’s your top priority?

What are you responsible for producing?

If you don’t know, how can you lead others?

For a CEO, the answers might be revenue growth, profit, company morale, culture, asset growth, EBITDA, communication, achieving the company mission and purpose, etc.,

What metrics are you responsible for? Do you have a measure for each of your accountabilities?

When you're clear about your responsibilities, you can confidently delegate to your team.

Clarity on your accountabilities helps you manage the standards you expect from your leadership team and those you manage.

Job Summary Scorecard - CEO

Clear expectations drive performance. We’ve shared this theme in any number of blogs including, Prioritizing Chipotle’s General Manager & Throughput, Decision - Achieve Accountability, Versatile Accountability Tool: Topgrading Job Summary Scorecard.

In CEO TEST - #1 Can You Develop a Simple Plan for Your Strategy we shared the top CEO critical accountability - Strategy. There are 7 Challenges all CEOs face as shared in The CEO Test: Master The Challenges That Make Or Break All Leaders, by authors Adam Bryant, and Kevin Sharer. (Download a quick summary here)

These 7 challenges are a good place to begin in developing your key accountabilities for your position as CEO.

Strategy, Culture, teamwork, transformation, listening, being calm in a crisis (See THE CHAIN-REACTION STRATEGY – Response), and managing the inner game of Leadership, are keys to your leading your business. Can you measure them, and report your progress to your board?

Measure Your Accountabilities

How do you measure your simple strategic plan? Is your business growing year over year at higher than industry averages? A lagging indicator would be revenue. Strategy in our Scaling Up Four Decisions framework is measured by revenue growth. In the CEO TEST, the role of the simple plan is to address two questions every employee deserves an answer to: What should I be working on? Why is it important?

As Joseph Jimenez, the former CEO of Novartis shares, “It has to be crystal clear……you have to distill the strategy down to its essence for how we’re going to win, and what we’re really going to go after so that people can hold it in their heads.”

Review the Topgrading CEO Scorecard example here.

A proper Job Scorecard is unique to each organization & role. Short-cutting the process by copying/pasting from samples is a mistake.   While there will be commonalities across roles, particularly in core values, the process is as important as your result. Building a CEO scorecard will require 4-5 hours including 2-4 people intimately familiar with the role.

What’s your scoreboard?

John Donahoe, CEO of Nike, shares, rather than framing the discussion around the question “What are we going to work on?” ask yourself, “What do we need to accomplish? What are the three or four things that, if we accomplish them over the next twelve months, will make this a good year?”

This is exactly the step we take with our Scaling Up & 3HAG WAY customers in our annual planning meetings, and then duplicate in every quarterly planning meeting.

You, your leadership team, and your front-line workers should have a clear line of sight as to what the metrics and achievements signaling success each quarter and year are.

This is exactly why each year, each quarter, and each position in your business needs a scorecard.

Too often CEOs are unclear about their accountabilities and expectations. Leadership team members are foggy about what the goal is for the year or the quarter. With this soupy mixture of clarity and communication, front-line workers have no purpose, commitment, or inspiration to work toward. Is it any wonder so many businesses fail to achieve?

“Can you create a vision that the frontline person can understand, and see how they fit into it?” —Susan Salka, CEO, AMN Healthcare

Just because you’ve created a simple strategy doesn’t mean you’re finished. You must communicate it, and there is no such thing as overcommunication.

COMMUNICATE!

What’s clear?

What’s not clear?

What’s missing?

Do employees understand how their jobs fit into the plan?

Do they understand what they should focus on day to day and why it’s important?

Are they clear on the scoreboard for measuring progress?

Finally, is your strategy memorable enough to pass the hallway test: if you stopped a dozen employees randomly as they walked between meetings and asked them to articulate your strategy, would you hear the same answer or twelve different ones?

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact in the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – Position Scorecards – Are You Winning?

Is winning important in your organization? How do you measure winning? Does every one of your team know whether they’ve won or lost at the end of the day? Job Summary Scorecards, Daily Huddles, Strategy, and Clear Priorities are keys to WIN for your business. We’ll explore this next blog.