How a Company’s Talent Pool Can Ensure Execution Success

How the company’s talent pool ensures execution success and in turn provides a guarantee of business strategy success (Article 3 of 3)

Through years of experience in international HR practices across a myriad of different industries, Talent Asia first observed business failures rarely hinge on one single factor only, however 9 in 10 companies who experienced business failures attributed the main cause to failures in strategy execution. Achieving executional excellence has been identified as the number one challenge facing CEOs all over the world[1].

Companies around the world spend billions annually to gather their best executives, consultants and innovators to devise cutting-edge strategies to grow their companies and better their bottom line. Unfortunately insufficient focus is placed on translating these good-on-paper plans into practice, and as a result no real successes are achieved by the organisation[2]. Ironically when examining their failures, executives end up misplacing emphasis on re-strategising rather than scrutinising the strategy execution.

There is a growing body of empirical findings that the focus must now be shifted from re-designing the strategy to emphasizing on strategy execution instead, and there has been a marked shift to place emphasis on this factor[3]. Further findings show that the primary root causes of these execution failures have to do with a breakdown in the systems and processes during execution, and/or the competence and motivation of the people who are responsible for the execution.

When companies have people with the relevant competence and right motivation for the job, breakdowns in the systems and processes during execution will eventually be fixed and even improved upon with creative solutions.

However, survey have shown that companies fail to choose the right candidate for the job 82% of the time[4]. This is compounded by the fact that only one in ten employees possess the right leadership talent[5].

Ineffective leaders result in a breakdown in employee engagement and therefore a fundamental misalignment between the execution team and the overarching business strategy due to a lack of communication, lack of understanding or even the failure to buy-in to the strategy.

This misalignment is directly responsible for lack of employee motivation; the executive team being unable to overcome adversity and challenges; a lack of accountability; as well as the inability of the executive team to make decisions.

[1] Harvard Business Review (2015, March) Why Strategy Execution Unravels—and What to Do About It. https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-strategy-execution-unravelsand-what-to-do-about-it

[2] Deloitte (2016, October) CFO Insights- Strategy execution: What could possibly go wrong? https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/finance/articles/cfo-insights-solving-for-execution-risk.html

[3] Harvard Business Review (2017, November 20) 5 ways the best companies close the strategy-execution gap. https://hbr.org/2017/11/5-ways-the-best-companies-close-the-strategy-execution-gap

[4] Gallup (2016) Why Great Managers Are So Rare. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231593/why-great-managers-rare.aspx

[5] Ibid.