Implementation Strategies

Congratulations, your team has developed a shared vision for the future. Now comes the hard part - implementation!

The five secrets of successful implementation

1. Personal accountability. It may require a cast of many to achieve the result but success requires a single point of accountability - the Owner of the Key Result Measure (KRM).
2. Implementation leadership. The cast of many requires clarity, coordination, and continuous communication facilitated by the KRM Owner.
3. Ongoing huddles. Utilize regular implementation team meetings to complete a cycle of assessment of where you are and why, agreement on the next course of action, and who is accountable for the next set of actions.
4. Pay yourself first.Maintain a strategic queue separate from your operational to-do queue. Make sure you and your team devote 5%-15% of their time on strategic initiatives.
5. Free up resources. Simplify lower priority tasks, delegate, and identify steps and processes that can be eliminated.

Personal accountability

Part of what makes a strategic goal strategic is the fact that it deals with changing status quo. By the very nature of these goals’ implementation requires the coordinated efforts of several team members. How do you deal with the challenge of managing tasks dependent on several people? There are a couple of strategies that help:

• One, named individual takes responsibility for delivering the final result. That person manages both their personal effort (about 50% of their time) and the assistance they receive for others (about 50% of their time).
• Up front the owner of the result - the responsible, accountable party - makes sure every contributor knows what they are expected to contribute and by when. The owner can act as a coach once the contributors are on board, understanding and committing to delivering their piece of the puzzle.
• The owner takes responsibility for 100% of communications making sure the contributors understand the importance and impact of any memo, email, report, etc. The owner is proactive in making sure that the contributor is on track to deliver.
• If a contributor runs into some sort of snag the KRM Owner pushes to simplify tasks, reassign tasks, call others in to help, brainstorm, etc.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Implementation leadership

The KRM Owner leads the effort to achieve the outcome.

• The KRM Owner can account for where you are, why you are there, and what you are doing about it
• The KRM Owner facilitates the ongoing "huddle" team meetings, scheduling, solidifying decisions, following up
• The KRM Owner accepts no excuses. They beg, borrow, or "steal" the required resources.
• The KRM Owner prevents bottlenecks, tracking down required input/approvals, shifting assignments as required, forcing effective communications.

Ongoing huddles

The management tool is the huddle, held with the team on the field at that moment.

A football huddle lasts 30 seconds or less. A short tactical huddle typically last between 5 and 15 minutes. A strategic huddle, like the quarterly review or annual event lasts 1-2 days.

Agreement is the first phase in the cycle. It is necessary to agree on the priority of issues, tactical approach, and expected outcomes among the appropriate stakeholders. At a strategic level, this agreement is best reached between the CEO and the senior team during a two-day meeting and documented in the strategic plan. At a tactical level, reaching this agreement can be as simple as the huddle football players hold before every play.

Accountability refers to personal accountability or responsibility for completing a task and producing the agreed-upon outcome. Whether for a tactical action step or key result measure, one (and only one) person must be designated to be accountable. There will always be multiple people involved, but without a single point of accountability you get the situation where everybody is "responsible" but in reality nobody is.

Action is tactical. It is a burst of activity that moves us closer to a key result. One person is personally accountable for making sure it happen. There is a specific time period during which it will be completed. (Texas Instruments called this the W3 model – What will get done, Who will be accountable to make it happen, and When will it be completed.)

Then it's time to huddle again beginning with:

Assessment is accomplished in a meeting. To assess tactical actions, these meetings could be a daily, weekly, or monthly huddle that starts with a question of what you may have learned about previous plays, weak spots, etc. Strategically, senior management needs to close out the year’s strategic goals during an annual two-day meeting. Closing last year’s goals requires that management identify where the status quo has actually changed, and evaluated the success at achieving goals.

Pay yourself first

Recognize that operations is not a to-do list that will ever be finished but rather it is a black hole that will suck up any and all time you give it. In order to complete the important as well as the urgent you need a strategy:

• Recognize that 90%±5% of your time and resources is consumed by the day to day needs of operations. Scale your strategic goals to the 5% - 15% of time you can afford to invest in the future.
• Pay yourself first – i.e. make sure you put 2-6 hours/week into working the plan and let operational needs fight over the remaining hours.
• Make the merely important things urgent by aligning them with an external event like a trade show. (Or by using your command authority. “I need this report on my desk Monday morning!”)

Free up resources

How can you find the time to get it done? It can be done! That is why you get paid the “big bucks”. Don’t allow yourselves to become OBE - overcome by events.

• Reduce your effort on the less important tasks. (Apply the 80/20 rule)
• Use management techniques: delegation, simplification and risk management.
• Set realistic milestones based on the amount of discretionary time you actually have available (anywhere from 5-20 hours/week)
• Work smarter.
• Work harder.

How do you sustain strategic momentum?

Every year gather together a strategic planning team of the 5-12 people that will create the future and, as importantly, live with the consequences of that future. 

Applying all their passion and competence over two days; they build and/or rebuild the Progress Pyramid from the bottom up by repeatedly asking how. 

• How do you fulfill Vision? - by achieving your Mission
• How do you achieve your Mission? - by executing your Strategy
• How do you execute your Strategy? - with Strategic Goals
• Will the status quo get the job done? - unlikely, hence the need for strategic goals
• How do your goals change the status quo? - by implementing key results
• How will you implement key results? - by taking action in the here and now. 

Why wait? Myrna Associates can guarantee you will have a strategic plan in only two days! Check out your strategic planning services today.

Mary B. Myrna - A life well lived

Obituary: Mary Edith (Bechtol) Myrna born Almont, MI 08/23/1947 died 06/22/2021 Athens, GA

Mary was a victim of statistics. One in eight women will suffer from breast cancer and over 30% of breast cancer survivors will develop metastatic disease spread to other parts of the body years/decades later. Ten years after surviving aggressive treatment and its life-long side effects, a routine health check in 2019 discovered incurable Metastatic Breast Cancer on Mary’s spine and liver.

Mary was an exceptional person – cooking guru, financial wiz, disc jockey, loving mother of Adam and Kate, entrepreneur, and supportive partner to spouse John for 49 years.

Mary became responsible for the family meals at age 11, when her father passed and mother stepped in to run the local bank and support the family. Mary made every family recipe her own. For over 60 years she consumed every cook book, instructional video, and cooking competition show. Not only could she literally taste recipes, she was a master process engineer, reworking recipes and prep to enhance nutrition, simplify procedures, and minimize the chance of error.

Following a summer living in Mexico, Mary explored Spanish as a major at Central Michigan University. Realizing it wasn’t for her, she returned to Almont and applied her financial acumen in her family bank’s accounting department. Keeping busy, she played the saxophone, taught herself guitar and became a licensed DJ at WABX Detroit 99.5 FM.

Outgrowing Almont, she strapped her scooter to the back of her car and moved to Houston, working in the booming oil industry. Wanderlust coupled with supportive sister Beth in Washington led to accounting positions with computer companies in DC, including Assistant Controller at a high-tech start-up called Scientific Time Sharing, where she met her future spouse, John. After a whirlwind romance, they married in 1972.

With the decision to start a family, Mary “retired,” giving birth to John Adam in 1974 and Kathern Elizabeth in 1977. Both children were nurtured by Mary to become exceptional and practically perfect in every way. Adam is a Systems Engineer in Maryland and Kate is a tenured professor of Veterinary Ophthalmology in Georgia.

In 1991 Mary and her spouse John stepped off the cliff and started Myrna Associates. No formal product, no customers, and limited funds were the ideal formula for success, don’t you think? The family pitched in, bulk mailing over 4,000 hand stamped post cards a month inviting people to a $125 seminar on strategic planning. It worked! For over 30 years Mary managed the company finances and a myriad of office functions as COO. She was literally the woman behind the “successful man.”

Mary is survived by the many whose lives she touched. Her husband John, children Adam and Kate, Adam's spouse Jennifer, grandchildren Connor and Peter, sisters Beth and Kiki, brother Phil, and heartbroken dog Jester.

In leu of flowers please plant a Dogwood, Mary’s favorite, and think of her whenever you gaze at it.

For over 40 years Myrna Associates has worked with CEOs and their Leadership teams to turn vision into reality.

Through a blend of facilitating periodic strategic planning meetings and one-on-one coaching, their team-driven, strategic management process has enabled over 200 different organizations to achieve exceptional communication and focus, leading directly to sustained growth, leadership development, and lower CEO stress.

Unlike traditional strategic planning "experts" and their conceptual processes, the Myrna approach to strategic planning gets everyone to focus on what’s really important, which results in proactively changing the status quo, not with a lifeless, bound summary, but with a proven implementation process that engages the team, keeps people on track, and regularly held accountable for 30-, 60-, and 90-day action steps.

Give Myrna Associates a call to discuss how his team can help you achieve exceptional communications and focus
Phone: 

https://calendly.com/adammyrna/consultation-session-with-myrna-associates

“Myrna Associates' strategic planning process has directly contributed to our five-fold increase in EBITDA.”

“Our team is a fantastic one, from a creative level, but we lacked the discipline piece for accountable follow-through. Myrna Associates helped us, in two short days, to mature professionally, which will begin to guide us to solid growth.”

“In two days we've accomplished more in terms of gaining control of our future and focusing our efforts to reach our goals than in the previous 15 years.”