As Peter Drucker once said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And unless you develop a culture of accountability, your ability to execute is nothing more than an aspiration or a vision. In today's fast-moving digital world, establishing accountable culture means consistent communication that champions the business.
Let's look at how you can rally your team around championing the business by following a shared purpose. Let's explore some practical advice about when and why to have meetings.
One key thing links these two themes (champion the business and meetings) together: how we leverage our time. Suppose you spend all your time focusing on keeping operations ticking over. In that case, it's hard to do anything new — yet innovation is one of the most critical parts of being a leader championing the business. To ensure we have time to do that, we must protect our time and focus our meetings and energy on what matters. This leads to execution.
Learn How sales managers define an excellent team strategy
Be intentional about meetings
We looked at a few ways you can manage your meetings to save time and make them more worthwhile, centered around intentionality.
We kickstarted this by asking you about your careers' best and worst meetings, and there were some common themes. For example, you liked meetings involving connection, ideation, problem-solving, and innovation, while meetings without clarity centered on whoever has the loudest voice were among the worst.
To keep your meetings in the “good” category, we advise you to be as intentional as possible. Always think about what you're trying to achieve, and choose a metric to help you know you're succeeding — for instance, if people attend your meetings consistently, it's a good sign you're doing something right.
Even when the meeting is finished, you can still be intentional. Follow up with people after, especially the more introverted personalities who may need more time to process things.
And most of all, be ruthless about your time when necessary. If you're due to attend a meeting and unsure what it's about, reach out to the person who set it up. If you can't participate or think it wouldn’t be the best use of your time, consider delegating it to someone on your team or ask if there's a recording you can refer to instead.
Remember, we also have a lot of resources you can access as part of this course to help you manage your meetings more effectively.
Improving execution requires discipline
We spent a lot of time learning how to blend strategy and tactics to:
- Create the right focus.
- Take the right approach.
- Enable the right contribution.
- Deliver the right impact
By focusing the team on the "4Cs" of execution, you achieve a greater return on effort. That means getting more out of internal initiatives (like implementing CRM) or improving customer alignment (like selling to critical accounts). In addition, addressing questions using the execution framework helps you drive better clarity, connection, and communication while establishing a consistent cadence to get the right things done.
To help, we provided you with an execution framework to fill out with the team so you could think about an initiative you're currently working on and figure out what you've got to do with a more disciplined approach to execution.
What you can do
Think about how you're using your time, and be intentional and careful when planning. For example, are there any upcoming meetings you need to clarify expectations and objectives, or could there be any meetings you could skip to use your time better? Or maybe you realized that you need to be more intentional about your appointments and get your team behind you more. Do you need more feedback from them after, or to give them more clarity beforehand?
Meetings are where initiatives are managed, and teams come together to determine their approach to customers. By blending the purpose and intent of the meeting with the 4C Execution Framework, you create a better environment for people to ask questions and engage. Make sure you're intentional about which sessions are on your calendar and find a way to distinguish execution-focused meetings from meetings focused on "status reports."
What it means to you
Reframe how to execute in a way that makes a difference for the company and your team. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Take action to kick start this process to execute your company’s vision and strategy while holding yourself and others accountable.
