Why most organizations flounder when it comes to execution? Most people think it is unclear top-down strategy or disconnect between the executive and senior/middle management and culture of avoiding conflicts. Other feels the lack of deep knowledge of the business amongst the top leadership or self-created silos among various functions of the organization are the contributing factors. Let us review some of the causal factors supporting the Execution dilemma.

An organization has international presence across the globe with teams comprising of competent individuals in all segments of business. The company has been winning businesses and able to execute the projects with certain flaws and delays caused by the execution challenges. The cultural issue with accountability has never addressed and the lessons learnt not adequately addressed because these camouflaged to reflect as blames on organizational challenges like lack of resources, tools and budget constraints etc. The absence of accountability process triggered ignorance thus protect the bad actors within the organization and promote the culture of fear, as a result the managers used to stay quite during team meetings to please their colleagues by not raising their concerns. These internal issues never allowed the problems to surface and solved. The ultimate results is disengaged work force, dysfunctional teams and unsatisfied customer that eventually led to loss of revenue, affected growth, shareholders confidence and negative impact on overall business efficiency.

Most of us will try to relate the above situation with our work places and blame the organization however; it could be one way of seeing this whole situation, another perspective of this is self-accountability and understanding the role of each individual within the organization. The culture of an organization is a reflection of its leader, however culture is not something that can make or break very quickly, and it may take years to build or change culture. It is culture, which allows good and competent people to flourish; and it is culture, which permits bad apples to survive. The problem is it will not support both good and bad equally, the cultural deterioration process is like termite effect and by the time the gaps are visible it is too late to react.

Organizations suffer failures in their business but culturally strong teams are more resilient to these failures and quickly recover from the blow. Failure is not a bad thing as long is not repeated; and the organization has strong processes and procedures to postmortem the reasons of failures, identifying the root cause, and avoid repetition. However if the culture of ignorance, tolerating the reoccurring failures and rewarding the incompetent engraved in an organization, the process of finding the facts behind the failures is seized. The bigger problem is when people become afraid of holding themselves and others accountable for failures and the catastrophe happens if the leadership of the organization started to behave naïve in response to these failures. One of the solution is to develop a scrutiny process to identify the root causes of both human factor and machine factor to establish the accountability and link this with the individual and teams incentives.

Incompetence is what most people think another reason behind organizational execution dilemma; however, it started from the very beginning when organization hire their teams specially the top leadership team. The process of hiring specifically the interview process is the biggest issue where half a dozen of existing team members ask to interview a candidate, this process itself flawed because this selection process is more inclined towards hiring a “pleaser” who is liked by majority of the interview panel and is the best fit for the role. The interview panel who is the part of the organization with execution challenges will definitely do not want to hire someone who can stir the still water and challenge the status quo. This is the building block of the foundation laid on a flawed logic of hiring candidates by the existing underperforming and bureaucratic team of managers and executives. Suggested solution is to develop an independent hiring process without any internal or external influence.

Inadequate or weak management systems, in an organization where people consider themselves authority and above the existing processes and procedures, the culture of execution cannot prevail. Smart people outplayed by the powerful seniors, who killed their ideas by snubbing their voice and stopped the process of innovation. One of the solution is to adopt matrix organization system, though it is little complicated to follow however, it will open up the doors for ideas and promotes radical candor.

Decision-making, is another hurdle in the way of execution, a bad decision is better than no decision. However, in most organizations the culture of delaying the obvious decisions and the game of passing on the responsibility to someone else reflects lack of ownership and “not my job” kind of attitude. One way of improving the decision making process within the organization is to develop a stage gate process with definite steps and timeline to reach to a decision whether it prove right or wrong, with an agreed understanding of irreproachable accountability.

Politics in the organization is like parasite, which sucks all the positive energy and allow incompetence to flourish at the cost of talent. Though it is impossible to eliminate the politics, however it is important for the organization to spot and manage the politicians within teams specially the leadership team who are actually road blockers and show stoppers in the line of execution.

Some people might think on how these giant companies are still surviving if the situation is that bad. Actually, the process of deterioration takes time and there is always correction factor that push back or halt the decay rate but the creeping down process continues until a catastrophe struck the business.  

To conclude one of the biggest missing factor in most organizational values and cultures is the passion of becoming the best and take pride in developing and delivering the products and services to make the world a better place by innovation and drive the world towards better future and to connect people emotionally to this cause. Providence is not entirely out of our control as long as the culture of execution built, taught, and established by an organization.

Article by: Atif Rehman