I don’t know about the rest of you but 2006 has vanished and no one I’ve talked with (clients or contacts) seems to know where it went. Now we’re facing 2007 and the one thing most of us are sure of is that we better be well prepared! That means we need to plan and execute!

Over the years I’ve come to believe that the ability to plan and execute (p/e) are genetic traits that many of us are either lacking or they’re recessive. I say this on two levels, one very personal and the other based on years of interacting with clients and individuals.

Planners, i.e., those with the gene, aren’t necessarily the best teachers for us non-planners because they have this weird idea that planning is logical, it comes naturally—how else can you get the results you want when going from A to B, (in this case January to December) they ask—all it only takes a good plan to follow.

(They really can’t imagine not doing it—which is what I call weird thinking. Now, I’m a good p/e teacher for those without the gene, because I don’t have those basic “of course” assumptions.)

But planning alone isn’t enough; it’s only the starting point. Granted that p/e-defective genes aren’t all equal; a person can be far stronger in one area than the other, however, difficulty with planning frequently is the harbinger of faulty-to-no execution. I say this based on both personal experience and observation of the several thousand managers and individuals I’ve met over the years; a pretty fair sampling that might even be statistically significant.

Through client contact and business reading I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two identifiable factors present in varying intensity every time a company or a person did plan for something. Not desire, not even need; the critical factor that drives planning seems to be fear. In other words, whether it’s me, a small company, or Lou Gerstner when he took responsibility for IBM, planning is done most often and comprehensively when one’s back is to a wall and the fire’s closing in.

However, a plan is only a dream if it isn’t executed. So if it’s fear that drives planning, what drives execution? That’s easy, execution is driven by terror, i.e., fear to the nth power, or, continuing the analogy above, the fire has closed and one is getting scorched. At that point, most people become Olympic executing champions; they take responsibility, they make it happen, etc.

And therein lays the danger. When planning is based in fear, and execution is driven by terror, manager’s are more likely to become micro-managers who try and control the actions of all those below them to be sure that everything gets done, instead of empowering and enabling them to buy in at the planning stage and then trusting them to actively help drive its execution because they believe in it.

The way to change this isn’t gene-corrective surgery, rather it’s teaching yourself to move early, preferably before the first hints of fear and terror. This gives you more time to think and discuss, and your organization more time to offer input, be comfortable with the plan and believe in their ability to execute it.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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