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Focus on Problems Not Symptoms To Improve Strategic Execution and Results

Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Article Overview: Consistent execution and therefore results vex many small business owners to C suite executives. Possibly the reason for this is the strategy may focus on the symptoms and not the real problems.

Focus on Problems Not Symptoms To Improve Strategic Execution and Results

A recent posting by Laurie Ruettmann about employee engagement once again showed how many organizations focus on symptoms and not problems. Given that employee productivity research by Gallup suggests only 31% of all employee are actively engaged, the Question Behind the Questions (QBQ) is what is the organization doing or not doing strategically to build customer loyalty (both internal and external) that will increase sales, and create a customer centric culture of high performance?

One of the best models is the 5 Star Model by Jay Galbraith. This model allows you to determine the real obstacles (problems) keeping your organization from realizing its goals. Strategic Planning Training Coaching Tip: Ensure alignment between your strategies, structure, processes and systems, rewards and incentives and people.

Human behavior in many instances is reactive instead of proactive. When this happens, the higher order thinking skills are ignored because the brain is operating in its primitive state where emotions are high.

One way to improve reactionary behavior is to have individuals understand their own decision making styles and talents. This type of talent or performance assessment helps to create a working smarter, not harder culture because due to negative conditioning many people place more efforts on attempting to improve weaknesses than reinforcing talents or strengths.

When employees learn how to leverage their high order thinking skills and work with the organizational goals as long as strategy, structure, processes and rewards are in complete alignment, then employee engagement will increase along with the goal to increase sales and reduce costs. This will help to ensure consistent execution and the desired results.

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Article Tags: consistent execution, employee engagement, increase sales, small business owners



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