Guest Commentator: Avik Roy, Managing Director, Morph4Sys
What is the Execution Gap and what do organizations need to know to eliminate it?
“The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.”
– Tom Peters
If you found a hidden, untapped potential to unleash higher profits, faster growth, and increase enterprise value, would you pursue that opportunity? The Execution Gap is such an opportunity.
What is the Execution Gap?
Every leader understands that a good strategy is worthless without excellent execution. The Execution Gap is the difference between what an organization sets out to achieve and what gets done at the end of the day. It is the distance between expectations and results.
The Gap builds on itself, quarter after quarter. In other words, Gap debt compounds over time, eroding competitive advantage. It is invisible, seems innocuous, and exacts a recurring penalty on profit, growth, and value.
What are Gap symptoms?
How do you recognize the Execution Gap? A small sample of common symptoms include:
- Everyone is too busy, barely keeping their noses above the water
- Meetings are unproductive, more of a liability than an asset
- Whack-a-mole style firefighting is pervasive
- How important priorities stack up is ambiguous and unclear across the organization
- Important issues often resurface after being solved
- Turf battles and finger-pointing slows down progress.
What do you need to know and do to shrink the Gap?
Our experience points to shallow clarity and loose alignment as the root causes of the Execution Gap. So, how can you harness the power of deep clarity and tight alignment at your business? Three pathways to narrow the Execution Gap are:
- Execution Rhythm: Like the rhythmic pulse of music, establish a coherent, consistent execution beat that guides performance. Get everyone clear and aligned on an effective cadence, structure, engagement, and outputs for your unique business.
- Execution Culture: Like game awareness in team sports, get everyone clear and aligned on the “right” people in the “right” seats collaborating with the “right” behaviors and habits.
- Execution Skills: Like the expertise needed to master complex crafts, build mindsets and muscles for individuals and teams to effectively navigate and manage volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity outside their core areas of expertise.
Start with small and impactful improvements in these three areas if you want to unleash higher profits, drive faster growth, and increase enterprise value by shrinking the Execution Gap.
