STEP 2- Critical Success Factors: "How Do You Get There?"

After the Main Thing has been defined, the next question is “how do you get there?”
This brainstorming exercise is best served by people talking to each other to really understand the essential, critical success factors (CSFs)to accomplish the mission of the “Main Thing” and be filtered downward. This is what is called Vertical Alignment. The Power of Alignement, Wiley 1998 . Weak leadership, at any level of this deployment process will cause variability in the way the MT strategy will be executed.

Brainstorming includes asking the question, “What is unique to our business that if we can achieve a bunch of critical steps, we can be successful?”. Each “Main Thing’s” CSFs must include examinations of existing Leadership and Culture as two of the essential components.

Leadership: As we know, not only is it critical to articulate, communicate, deploy the MT to the workforce, but people must know “how to get there”. This “how to get there” must be effectively understood, tools to get there, communicated with uniformity, and with sincerity through the various roadmap, they need to deploy. What are challenges they face? What are the baselines? What does the workforce need to in the form of tools, leadership, culture shifts, emotional realignments, training, learning’s and communication skills to “get there”?

The finest measurement/diagnostic tools must be used to establish this baseline. Diagnostics must contain fine tuned analytics so that each department local manager will get a clear x-ray picture of their department, assessing whether those competencies exists to achieve best practices of each of the items or questions nested in each of the CSFs.



Culture: Effective execution is critically impacted by the organizations culture.





Remaining CSFs: Strategy makers know what needs to be done to reach the goals established around the main Thing. To get there, we need to to this and that. It’s the “this and that” which comprise the 3-5 critical success factors. These steps must be defined at the strategy level. These steps to success must be brainstormed, messaged, fishboned or whatever tools used, so there is a clear path or series of achievements to be met.

Take for a real example the President of a bank that wanted to grow his commercial banking business by 15% in a year. These are clear fined goals; an understandable Main Thing. His critical success factors were: Leadership, Culture and customer focus.

LEADERSHIP: He knew for his leadership, he needed to know his manager’s ability to delivered, by learning if his vertical alignment of leaders, at all levels and in all department, had capabilities, or needed help, to lead in 6 essential areas: Change, communication skills, industry knowledge, immediate supervisor leadership and vision and strategy.

CULTURE: Motivation, teamwork, job knowledge and integrity

CUTOMER FOCUS: Technology, Expand the business relationships, drive the business development, quality service and bank service

An “amazing win” for this leader was profitability, but he knew what his organization needed to do, the strengths he needed to expand or the needs of his workforce he wanted to fulfill. For this leader, he knew that without taking the time and energy to clearly define his goals and mission and how to get there, these essential, critical measures would be left to others. Usually those other have not the same passion or insight, and there is no message more powerful than that of the “boss defining the way”.



EXECUTION:

The theory and models of success have been define by the leader, but execution is becomes a very large stumbling block. What is even more troubling that good execution at parts of the organizations, coupled with fair or medioca execution in most of the organization and poor execution in a portion of the organization will lead to varying levels of conflict, inefficiency, ineffectiveness. This is what I describe as “aligned performance variability”. Take the example of an 8 cylinder , hi performance engine, the “hemi”, but working 2 cylinders are performing perfectly , 2 are operating at 80% capacity, 2 at 60% and 2 at 20 %. That’s performance variability..

There are many reasons for this inexact delivery or deployments system. The reasons can stem from culture issues, communication, poor trust issues, weak managers, angry workers, and so on…The fact is that there is a disappointed, frustrated leader who anguishes as his or her best plans of utopia for the shareholders and the organization are languishing. Frustration turns to acceptance, turning to expensive fix-it plans created internally or by consultants.

SOLUTIONS:

Eliminating performance variability of the holy grail, the “critical success factors”, but by each demographics or department is the solution. Is a global, off the shelf training program, the answer? How about a manger retreat where power points of survey scores are plastered on screens and the audience visibly gasps and then goes back to “the old normal”. Not by intentional fault, but by lack of an effective plan of solution.

Failure of changes management or business transformations are not the “cross to bear “ of any particular leadership group. Sporadic improvements, not sustained, will revert back to the “old normal” as the people expected to perform are plain old people with the frailty of humanity. Compounded by then putting groups of these people together, with varying degrees of commitment, gender differences, education, love hate with manager, with each other certainly makes a global training program’s suspiciously effective.

This is but one department. Now add 20-50 to 500 more departments. The expectation of leadership that each depart will execute upon the decreed “critical success factors” with dispatch. Idyllically, if each department can and will, with the same degree of success, the leaders “Main Thing” will be achieved.