Execution Excellence – the missing ingredient!
by Marc Rogatschnig on 22/10/08 at 7:30 pm
2 comments
Leadership is such a contested space – everyone wants to own it!
From sports guru’s to fading corporate stars and the sprinkling of politicians to dictators – they’re all experts, they’re all more right than the others and invariably they have a formula, 10 step-model or book to prove themselves.
Actually, we all know they are all right some of the time and all wrong some of the time – they’re simply contributing towards the greater experience of leadership.
My fascination with leadership goes a long way back yet I havn’t devoured the literature at all. I am an experiential learner, I learn more from conversations than from books – that’s how I retain what I need to know.
My understanding of leadership thus changed dramatically when I met Colin Hall from Learning to Lead (www.ltl.co.za). In a short conversation in 2001 I began to get a grasp on a concept of leadership that intuitively felt complete (now that’s a claim to make!!!). Colin has walked the towers of corporate business for 50 years, he has scoured knowledge systems in nature, science, religion, psychology, new science, philosophy, ancient culture, history etc to prove his fundamental understanding of leadership.
Essentially Colin states –
‘Great leaders have mastered the ability to spiral energy up in the people around them’.
Colin writes:
From when we are very young and have to get up in the morning to face the day, getting things done has been the daily challenge. Getting to school, learning tables, opening the shop, cooking and cleaning, essential DIY, having meetings, running the country! A daily relentless challenge we all face with limited resources of money, time, ideas and help.
And if getting things done isn’t difficult enough, we have to get them done right. We have to be at school on time, know our tables backwards, and run the country well.
But it gets worse. We have to get right things done right – morally right, the right priorities … and so on.
And then we have to get right things done right together, so we have to master social skills, emotional intelligence, trust, communication and tolerance. These all become essential capabilities.
Then we find ourselves working in teams and that changes the dynamics of the daily challenge. It now becomes the management challenge! The right people, with the right skills, in the right jobs, at the right cost, with the right ideas, in the right relationships with others, with the right attitude and facing in the right direction!
What a challenge that is, and to make it possible we create “recipes” – best practices, GAAP, King Commission rules, stock exchange rules, policy documents, management performance systems, job evaluation processes, computer programs, enterprise wide systems, business processes, safety procedures …. and …. and ……! We have to teach, train, measure, control, monitor and enforce.
That’s what managers do – all day, almost every day. And unfortunately it is the Bottom Line and it is not negotiable. It is a linear relentless journey to effectiveness. Some prefer to call it “Execution Excellence” – it seems to sound better!
But in all of this we seem so often to forget the key input – the flipside of the challenge.
It’s energy – the energy to get things done.
Without energy, with batteries that are flat, getting anything done becomes difficult, sometimes impossible.
Leaders understand that balance between effectiveness and energy is crucial …. on a sustainable basis. They can create the conditions in which high energy effective teams of high energy effective individuals constantly outperform low energy teams and low energy individuals. Managers simply cannot.
Low personal energy, low or negative energy in an organisation, is as infectious as a virus. It doesn’t take too long to infect the customers and low negative energy customers are a nightmare.’
Colin & LTL have developed a simple but reliable tool to measure energy at the personal level, amongst the leadership, and at the organisational level. It’s an Energy Survey (eQ) and it provides a “photograph” of the levels of energy and how it is flowing (or not flowing!), and whether it is negative or healthy.
Marc Rogatschnig follows the Arnold Schwarzenegger rule of branding: "If you can spell my name right, I must be doing my job right". Marc is a business consultant, surfer, Africa traveler, energy ambassador, dreamer and a big fan of common courtesy. Marc also happens to be a Clinical Psychologist, so watch your comments or he’ll publicly expose you for being a bed wetter at age 12. View more articles by Marc Rogatschnig.
Andrew Smith
Oct 23rd, 2008
Unfortunately, readers low energy readers of this blog with low energy would not have had the stamina to get to the end of this post, and then make a decision to change their habits and outlooks.
What is your one actionable task (preferably taking 15 minutes or less per day) that we can do to start the upward spiral?
Marc
Oct 24th, 2008
Thanks Andrew, i’ll tone down the verbosity. Essentially it all starts with relationships – building trust and loading them with good quality information. So, try this – everyday at least 5 times per day – do something for someone else that will raise their energy. Examples – thank them, praise them (genuinely), listen to them, do them a favour without being asked. When you are raising the energy other people – yours always goes up too. Remember – share high quality information and build trust! that is where it starts!