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| Denver Business Journal | | | 01/18/08 - Denver, CO | If 2007 wasn't the year it could have been for you as a CEO or head of an organization, you might want to embrace a New Year's resolution that will increase your organization's effectiveness.
Since success is the offspring of execution, your resolution might be: "I resolve in 2008 to execute more effectively." However, since you know that if something doesn't get measured it doesn't get done, how are you going to determine 12 months from now if you achieved your objective?
The answer can be simple: Don't wait 12 months. If you measure your personal progress weekly, and also quantify the success of the organization every week, you'll have 52 ongoing points of reference on which to gauge your success and alter the course of business as needed.
The tool you'll use to make this happen? It's called a "commitment plan," and it applies to everyone in the organization who has any management responsibilities -- from the CEO on down to the loading dock manager. The commitment plan is applied by quarter (13 weeks).
Here are the seven steps to developing and effectively using the 13-week commitment plan:- First, decide what objectives you want to achieve with your organization this year. The objectives must be quantifiable and fully measurable, and you and your team must be willing to commit to them fully.
- Discuss these objectives with your management team, asking them to candidly assess them for their appropriateness, whether they're realistic, their potential effects, their value, whether they can be committed to and other relevant factors.
- Next, determine what actions you personally must take each week, without fail, to support achievement of the overall goals. Set these objectives by quarter, and then divide them into weekly milestones and deliverables for which you personally will be responsible for rolling periods of 13 weeks.
You'll write these weekly milestones into a Microsoft Excel worksheet, creating the basis for the first quarter of your quarterly commitment plan. These milestones are to be formally updated weekly, of course, for 13 weeks.- Now the real work begins. You and your executive team members must decide on appropriate weekly deliverables for each of them that will support achievement of your personal goals and the organization's goals. Because each team member's Excel-based, 13-week commitment plan advances the overall organizational goals, supports each other's work and your own commitment plan, the plans are interlocking and interdependent.
- Then, develop 13-week commitment plans for managers all the way down through the organization. All managers' 13-week commitment plans, written into Excel worksheets, support the goals and objectives of peer and superior managers, all the way back up to the top, to you.
In this process, everyone knows where the organization is going and understands the quantifiable specifics needed to get there week by week. It's an acknowledgment that, "I need to do this so he/she can do that."- And now, each week for 13 weeks, meet with your executive team without fail to quantify everyone's achievements for that week. Generally, the assessment is pretty easy -- either they hit their goals or they didn't, and if not, there's some explaining to do to the group, and behavior modification may have to occur.
- At the same time, each week for the same 13 weeks, teams of managers below the executive team (all the way down to the loading dock supervisors or mail room managers) meet, without fail, to determine whether they're meeting their weekly commitments to their personal plans and to each other.
Development of 13-week commitment plans for all managers in the organization will require hard work that'll probably take 60 days or so to complete the first time, so shoot for the beginning of the second quarter of 2008 to begin the process.
With the plans in place, there are three key elements that must be in play for the process to work, and for you to be certain you'll achieve your organization's predictable results for the year.- First, the process must have absolute and complete support, buy-in and participation from the CEO.
- Second, there must be unambiguous communication when determining achievables, setting up commitment plans and holding managers accountable during weekly meetings.
- Third, you and everyone in authority must apply unrelenting follow-up to find out how and when commitments will be met, and if not, why not, with behavior modification being a known certainty.
Laurence Valant, president and CEO of business performance improvement consultancy Valant & Company, can be reached at 303.589.3840 or lvalant@valantco.com. |
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