What happens after you make a decision to ensure its implementation? How do you ensure that your ideas turn into reality, whether you’re tasked with execution or delegating to a team?
I’ve been an operational leader for startups for the past seven years. And in doing so, I often find I’m most immediately helpful to teams in the department of getting shit don- uh.. execution. And that’s what I’d love to explore today: how to simplify execution and repeatedly bring your plans to life.
One-Paragraph Summary:
Consistently & predictably getting shit done requires that you:
- Know where you’re going, and communicate the plan clearly internally. Ensure you’ve set a vision for your business; if you’re unsure where to begin, start with painting a clear 1, 3, and 5-year picture. Secondly, more granularly, your team needs clarity too – both in the long-term vision and the day-to-day stepping stones (requests) being made of them. Lead by example, and make complete clarity a prerequisite of kicking off a project or task for everybody involved.
- Have a system that you can plop work into, forget about it, and still follow through on it. Aka a project management system. I use Asana, it doesn’t matter what you use. Notion is great and has a ton of free templates. What is important is that this system creates predictability around completing work. In other words, once it’s in there, you’ll/your team will do it.
- Build a habitual bridge between decision and your PM system. In my solo business, I habit stack to get this done. Once I kick off a project, I plop it into my PM system, set the first task to “Build out project”, and never think about it again until it’s time to complete it. When I’m running teams, a person (EA, Ops Manager, or PM) will often hold this responsibility. You’ll also most likely benefit from leveraging tools like Zapier to take away repetitive steps of the process.
Let’s look at each of these more closely, and how to achieve them.
From a systems level, predictable & sustainable execution requires:
- Clarity (of vision, requirements, success)
- A predictable PM system
- A habitual bridge between the two
A lot of companies I work with have ideas. Even fewer have a clear vision, but What SO few small businesses have, and will be a linchpin to scaling, is a predictable bridge from request/decision/whatever to action.
When I come into growing companies, I often own the second two. While I have coached execs around leading a team with clarity, I will often leave the ownership of the vision to them.
Let’s take a brief look at the importance of clarity & how to achieve, then let’s dive into how we turn a clear vision into reality.
1. Have Clarity.
The goal: Have a clear image of where you’re going, who’s doing what, and how to communicate to mitigate a game of telephone.
Clarity of vision
I used to think of ‘vision’ as an ambiguous buzz word that orgs and consultants use as a cop out as to why something isn’t working. Today, my definition has greatly widened, and I see clarity of vision as a necessary component to achieving the goal.
It is the goal.
Often when I meet with individual business owners, or stakeholders on a team wondering if I’m a good fit to help them, I often find myself asking, “Where are we headed?” Or “To what end?”
I’m attempting to extract the purpose behind a desired change, new business, new product, whatever it may be. Not knowing that is like embarking on a road trip with no end destination.
Which, by the way, could be pretty fun; maybe you’ll figure out where you want to go based on the information you get after your first stop or two. And that’s completely fine. Don’t allow a lack of direction to be the reason you don’t wander.
Lastly, there’s no inherent right way to understand and present this vision. If you’re a solo business, all that matters is that you understand your 1/3/5 year goals as a business, and how your model adapts over time to accommodate them.
If you’re running a team, you still want to set those same goals, but now you need others to not only understand, but give a damn. To help in that communication, I’ll often bring the team into specific parts of the planning process so it’s not a one-sided decision, then use a visual roadmap to represent our vision.
There are so many road map templates out there, pick your favorite. Here are a few starting points:
Clarity of requests & tasks
This clarity becomes much more difficult to maintain the more people you have working with/for you.
Have you ever gone off to work on a project, only to meet again with the person who requested your time and be hit with, “This is not at all what I had in mind.”?
Or maybe you’ve been on the other side of that coin.
Every month my uncle Bruce Patterson, an Executive Communications Manager at Intel, and I shoot the shit over brunch.
One brunch he shared one approach Intel uses to ensure clarity of communication around tasks & requests, and it’s called fully formed requests.
In a nutshell, fully formed requests give the requester and the requestee the same boxes to check before they go off and execute. The boxes are:
- What the ask is
- Who is requesting it
- The deadline
- The conditions of satisfaction i.e. how will we know it’s complete/a success?
If you’re delegating, build a habit of checking these boxes. If you’re being asked to take on a task or project, ensure you have clarity on all of these before you respond & get to work.
Then, the requestee can respond in three ways:
- “Yes”, accepting all requirements
- “Yes, but”, agreeing to the task but suggesting an alternative to one of
- “No, but”, declining the request, and providing reason why + an alternative if necessary
What doesn’t work here are common responses like “I think I can do that” or “I’ll add it to my list to come back to” or any other variation that leaves things up to chance.
Lastly, I haven’t found as much success with this approach by being prescriptive; I’ve found success by planting this seed with my teams, living by example, and attempting to turn this level of clarity into a habitual lens we look through as a team, as opposed to forcing folks through a formal process.
2. Get a predictable Project Management system in place.
The goal: Build a system that predictably & sustainably completes work on-time, on-budget, and to a high standard.
A project management system helps get even more out of your brain and into a machine that lives, well, outside your brain.
It also doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, it’s usually advantageous for it not to be.
What is important, however, is the output of whatever PM system you’re leveraging. It must allow you to:
- create and assign tasks
- set deadlines, &
- track progress of tasks.
There are many ‘nice-to-haves’, for teams in particular, like cost/resource management capabilities, various tool integrations (CRM, email management etc.), reporting capabilities etc., but I’ve found those to be non necessities in the pursuit of getting shit done.
Currently, I use Asana to manage my personal projects, and it’s typically my recommendation for organizations who need some structure around task management.
I’ve also used Notion, Google Sheets, ClickUp, and more. They all function similarly in this conversation, and it’s difficult to go wrong.
If you’re starting completely from scratch, I recommend setting up Notion & starting with one of their gazillion PM templates, which you can also format in Google Sheets if preferred.
3. Build a habitual bridge between your ideas and your PM system.
The goal: Build predictability around following through with your plans. How? Build a habitual bridge between your ideas and your well-oiled execution machine.
Once you have clarity & a system that you can plop work into and feel confident it’ll be acted upon, the last piece of the puzzle is to predictably bridge the two.
It’s important to note that this bridge does not lead to entire projects being built out with milestones and deadlines and tasks for the duration of the project. This is precisely what your predictable PM system does. This bridge needs to place ideas at the door of that system.
For me, this often means creating a new project in Asana, and assigning myself (or whomever) the first task of “Build out project” with a deadline.
Now I just need to follow through. And I don’t need to rely on motivation, or memory, to do so.
There’s not one right way to go about this either, here’s a few:
- Assign it to a person, often an EA, Ops Manager, or even Project Manager on small teams. It’s not uncommon that I’ll take on this role as I’m building the systems/habits, then delegate it elsewhere.
- Automate it. Depending on your tooling, you’ll likely be able to automate decisions & action plans being placed into your PM system. For instance, there are several ways to automate the creation of a task in Asana, natively and via third party tools like Zapier.
- Make it an individual responsibility. I’ve been on small teams (<5) where it made the most sense for each individual to manage their work. We used a shared space for visibility, but without a dedicated project manager or operational support, it made the most sense to empower each individual to manage their work & be their own bridge.
- Habit stack. You know folks who live by their calendars? Like, if it’s not in there it won’t happen? These people (me) will often add events to their calendar the second the decision is made. They build the habit of putting events into their calendar by stacking it with something that’s already predictable: having events to attend . In my solo business, I also do this with tasks. If I think of something I need to do, I add it to my “Alex’s one-off tasks” project with a deadline. Now I don’t think about it ever again, until I’m doing it.
I hope you took away something useful from these reflections. If you’re looking for additional support in bringing your ideas to life, and managing the team around that execution, please don’t hesitate to reach out at alex@alexcartmill.com. If I’m not the best fit for you, I’ll do my best to point you in a better direction.