Six Disciplines for Leaders
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Excellence is an enduring pursuit; it requires an enduring approach.
Is excellence important to you and your organization? Do you want it to be? Today, it's hard to pick up a business book or magazine and not find the latest advice for what it takes for business leaders to pursue excellence. Although business leaders vary in their own definitions of excellence, most would agree that excellence is a never-ending pursuit. They also agree that whatever their challenges and opportunities are today, they will be different tomorrow.
Frequent challenges mentioned by business leaders include:
- Communication -- employees lack clarity and direction, limiting innovation and results
- Accountability - measurements of and responsibility for results are insufficient
- Engagement -- people don't seem to care as much or aren't sure of their role within the company
- Alignment - employee activities aren't connected with organization mission and strategy
- Direction - disconnect between planning, strategy and execution
- Transition - a desire to "pass the torch" successfully
- Control - things "feel" out of synch
- Frustration - excessive friction in daily work
- Risk Management - profit variability versus growth rate
Our goal is to help business leaders realize that their particular challenge at the moment is a symptom of a deeper need all growing organizations face: the need to systematically increase the capability of their organization to address future challenges.
Since excellence is an enduring pursuit, it requires an enduring approach. A business excellence program is an organized approach to grow a leader's ability to deal with an ever-changing-and increasingly challenging-business environment. By enduring, I mean that the program needs to grow with the business, year-after-year, one that enables leaders - and every employee, every day -- to align their plans and activities to supporting the organization's strategies to achieve its goals. Over time, the practice of activity alignment becomes a habit, increasing the organization's ability to continually learn and improve performance.
From our research, we found that successful leaders - regardless of organization size or industry - learn to master six fundamental disciplines: strategy, planning, organization, execution, measurement and learning.
You can think of these six disciplines as a series of annual, quarterly, weekly and daily repeatable cycles which, with each successive pass, helps leaders and their teams to more effectively execute in their pursuit of enduring business excellence. Here are the six fundamental disciplines:
1. The Strategy Discipline - Decide What's Important - The foundation of all strategy formulation is deciding what is most important to your organization (and by implication what's not important) so the allocation of resources-time, money and creativity-can all be aimed toward this end. In this annual discipline, business leaders systematically and regularly review and renew their mission, values, strategic position, vision, their most vital few objectives, as well as agreeing what to stop doing.
2. The Planning Discipline - Set Goals That Lead. Well-defined goals are among the most effective communications tools available to any leader-yet most leaders don't know how to set goals that lead their people in the right direction. The result of this Planning Discipline is to produce annual goals that are both clear and measurable. Pursuing these goals will lead the people in the organization to align their daily activities with the vital few objectives set in the Strategy Discipline. The result is a brief company goals statement that every team member can understand and support in their daily activities.
3. The Organization Discipline - Align Systems. One of the greatest barriers an organization faces in pursuing its goals -- is itself. For many businesses, the systems that make up the business-its policies, processes, technologies, measures, and people-are often at cross purposes with the priorities of the company. Why? Because most leaders do not have an organized approach to keep their systems aligned with their strategy. The Organization Discipline taps the knowledge of the entire workforce to identify the areas where the company will get the greatest return on its investment in policies, processes, measures, technologies and people.
4. The Execution Discipline - Work the Plan. One of the greatest organizational learning tools ever invented is the individual quarterly plan. In the Execution Discipline, every person in the company works with his/her team leader to develop Individual Plans for the upcoming quarter. These individual goals are reviewed and checked for alignment with company goals. This quarterly plan serves as a timesaving template for a weekly status report. The result is that every individual in the company learns how to set goals, understands company priorities, takes responsibility for their own goals, learns to become accountable, reports progress and uses their innovative capabilities to solve problems.
5. The Measurement Discipline - Innovate Purposefully. Innovation is just another name for problem-solving, and everyone in the company has the ability to solve problems. The Measurement Discipline is unlike the rest in that it provides principles and measurement tools that are used throughout the other disciplines to help leaders set clear goals - and align daily activities toward meeting them. These goals will align with company priorities, and employees use their innate creativity to meet or beat those goals.
6. The Learning Discipline - Step Back. This annual discipline helps leaders step back from the pressures of everyday business and gain perspective on the factors that affect overall business performance. This is achieved through a series of "discovery exercises," exploring externals (competitors, industry, economic) and internals (goal performance, stakeholder feedback, measures, SWOT.) In addition to business leadership stepping back, all individual team members are encouraged to do the same by providing input on each other's performances, which is achieved by completing a 360° feedback survey and an annual performance appraisal.
Six fundamental disciplines are all it takes - yet, it all sounds so simple. But it doesn't stop there. The biggest challenge with business improvement programs in general is not their content or approach; it's that companies (and their leaders) are not able to stick with them. Change initiatives, in general, just don't last, and the problem is even more pronounced in small and mid-sized companies, which face the additional barriers of economics and expertise to make them all work together over time. Based on intensive field research, it has been proven that an enduring business excellence program must have the following four required components:
- A repeatable methodology to drive organizational leadership
- External coaching for organizational accountability
- A system to align the activities of every team member, every day
- A community of like-minded people and organizations to accelerate learning
Only when these four synergistic elements come together can business leaders expect to see enduring change within themselves - and within their organizations.
Gary Harpst is founder and CEO of Six Disciplines LLC, developers of the first enduring business excellence program, designed specifically for small and mid-sized businesses. Harpst is also the author of "Six Disciplines for Excellence." Email gharpst@SixDisciplines.com.
