How to Increase Your Team’s Execution Speed

What do most managers do when their team fails to keep up with their commitments or is not able to meet promised delivery timelines?

They look for external reasons or causes to assign blame and justify why things didn’t end up the way they expected. 

We don’t have enough people. 

Timelines were very aggressive. 

Team xyz didn’t finish their work on time. 

Attributing a team’s failure to things beyond control and refusing to take responsibility prevents these managers from understanding the real hurdles that get in the way of their team’s execution and performance. 

Old mindsets, old practices and old ways of doing things continue to disappoint stakeholders and others invested in results. 

A good strategy needs an excellent team to execute and managers that don’t pay attention to their team’s execution speed end up with mediocre performance and wasted potential. Elaborate plans are of no use if a team does not know how to put them to use. 

Execution has to be a part of a company’s strategy and its goals. It is the missing link between aspirations and results. As such, it is a major—indeed, the major—job of a business leader. If you don’t know how to execute, the whole of your effort as a leader will always be less than the sum of its parts.
— Larry Bossidy, Execution

Pay attention to these 5 practices that are often ignored, but are critical to your team’s execution speed:

Involve them in the planning phase

A team in an execution phase that’s asked to deliver is often disconnected from the planning process. 

They are given a set of requirements to build without any context and clarity on why something is important. Treating team members as executioners who don’t need to be involved in planning prevents them from:

1. Saying no to activities that aren’t worth their time.
2. Separating critical requirements from business as usual. 
3. Connecting their goal to the larger goals of the organization. 
4. Making decisions that are aligned with what they value and also what the stakeholders want.  

Knowing the ‘why’ of doing something is not only  highly motivational, it enables teams to tackle setbacks and challenges along the way. Being involved in the planning process leads to insights that are otherwise hard to understand and communicate.

When employees at all levels share a common understanding of where the company is headed, what success looks like, whom their competitors are, and what needs to be achieved to claim victory, there is a remarkably low level of wasted time and energy and a powerful sense of traction.
— Patrick Lencioni, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive

Your team’s execution speed is dependent on how well they are connected to the larger goals of the organization. Don’t limit their reach. Extend visibility beyond tasks and timelines. 

Provide requirement clarity 

Team’s in the execution phase waste a lot of time going back-n-forth on the requirements. Lack of clarity, missing examples and use cases, and unverified assumptions make it hard for the team to move at a good execution pace. 

Top it with the ad hoc requirements that show up every now and then which considerably slows the team down and distracts them from the big goals at hand. 

Your team’s execution speed is directly proportional to how well the requirements are framed and explained. Not paying attention to it is a big leadership mistake. 

Vagueness causes confusion, but clarity of thought and purpose is a huge advantage in business. Good leadership requires a never‐ending process of boiling things down to their essentials. Spell out what you mean! If priorities are not clearly understood at the top, how distorted will they be down the line?
— Frank Slootman, Amp It Up

Success in organization not only requires a winning strategy, but also excellent speed of execution. Your team can’t achieve it without superb clarity on what needs to be done. 

Reduce time spent in meetings 

Meetings are the biggest productivity killer. Team members who spend a large part of their time attending meetings hardly have time left to do any real work. 

Too many meetings dry up their mental resources that’s required to do deep thinking and make progress on work. Less time to do focused work also prevents them from achieving a state of flow—which is when they lose track of time by being fully immersed in an activity. Flow helps them to do their best work by reaching their peak performance without distractions and self-doubts. 

Instead of attending every meeting that shows up on their calendar, help them identify which meetings are worth their time by asking these questions: 

1. How will I add value to this meeting?
2. What can I expect to learn from this meeting?
3. Is there anyone else who can take my place?
4. What will happen if I don’t attend this meeting?

To pursue mental operations to any depth, a person has to learn to concentrate attention. Without focus, consciousness is in a state of chaos.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow

Your team can either waste time attending meetings or put it to use by working on their tasks. Both are not possible. 

Increase their execution speed by cutting down on meetings and increasing the number of hours doing independent work or collaborating. 

Empower them to make decisions 

Managers who are involved in every small detail, every small problem and every minor decision slow down their team. Not being empowered to think for themselves and make decisions prevents their team from finding ways to unblock themselves when they’re stuck. 

Managers are busy creatures. So, by the time they respond to their team’s query or get involved, their team ends up wasting a significant amount of their time. 

Managers may think that they’re helping their team go fast by avoiding mistakes, in reality, they become a bottleneck and prevent their team from moving fast. 

Empowerment = fn (control, competence, clarity, correction)

Empowering teams involves: 

1. Developing methods that enable the team to separate decisions they can make independently from the ones that require collaboration across different functions and groups.
2. Equipping the team with the required competence to be comfortable in stepping out of their comfort zone and challenging the status quo.
3. Providing clarity that encompasses a set of values and principles to make the best decision under the given circumstances while stating the underlying assumptions and not losing sight of the big picture.
4. Most importantly using feedback as the necessary tool to learn and improve. 

For a team to succeed, responsibility must go down deep into the organization, down to the roots. Getting that to happen requires a leader who will delegate responsibility and authority to the team. Good leaders seldom restrict their teams; they release them.
— John C. Maxwell, The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork

Help your team achieve epic execution speed by distancing yourself from a few decisions and enabling your team to step up and make those decisions for themselves. 

Setup intermediate milestones 

Managers who don’t monitor the execution cycle closely lose the opportunity to measure their team’s execution speed, identify things that slow them down and put a plan in place to tackle them. 

A great way to reduce the risk of not delivering on time is to set up intermediate milestones. Milestones enable the team to check their progress, incorporate feedback and course correct before it’s too late. 

Tracking milestones throughout the execution cycle also prevents rework by validating assumptions, seeking inputs and ensuring short term deliverables align with the long-term goals. 

Another advantage of setting milestones is the sense of satisfaction and motivation they bring when your team strikes them and marks them complete. It not only keeps them on the path, but also energizes them to keep going. 

We needed internal milestones within the project—regular check-ins where we would make sure everybody understood how the product had evolved and could evolve their side of the business along with it. And to make sure the product still made sense. To see if marketing still liked it. To see if sales still liked it. To see if support could still explain it. To make sure everyone knew what they were making and the plan to launch it.
— Tony Fadell, Build

Enable your team to maintain a great execution pace throughout the cycle by breaking down a large goal into smaller milestones and seeking feedback along the way. 

Summary

1. Vision and strategy only set the direction. Execution is the long-term key to success.
2. Speed is the ultimate weapon in business because ideas are worth nothing unless executed and put to use at the right time. 
3. Limiting your team to deliverables, tasks and outcomes prevents your team from connecting their work to the larger goals of the organization. Involve them in the planning phase to help them feel a part of something big. 
4. Half baked requirements frustrate teams who want to move fast. Lack of clarity, missing details and unwarranted assumptions waste their time and energy. Pay attention to clarity and completeness of requirements and see your teams move at a blazingly fast speed. 
5. If your team members are spending a significant part of their time in meetings, they’ll have very less time to do quality work. Unburden them with less meetings and more hours being productive. More work will get done in less time. 
6. If your team can’t make their own decisions, they can’t move at a fast pace. Your meddling and desire to be part of every small thing does not help, it only slows them down. Empower them to make a few decisions on their own where your inputs are not required. 
7. Big goals are hard to track. Not only do they leave you clueless about how the team is doing, but also whether you’ll achieve them in time. This is where milestones help. Breaking goals into milestones helps you incorporate feedback into the execution cycle and course correct before it’s too late. 

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