As a business leader your job right now is to make sure that as the economy recovers (though we hear and see different outlooks on how fast and how soon), you are making the most out of it. Sit on your butt and take for granted that you’ll just grab a good, and maybe disproportionate, share of the increased demand, and you’re in for a big surprise. In a recession the strong survive and come out stronger. Customers are even more demanding and competition is stiffer. Especially from those looking to grow at your expense.

Whatever your plan for incremental business accelerating your growth with the recovering economy, there’s one thing you really need to make sure happens within the organization. In lieu of the weather and the economy, you really can do something about how you execute on your strategy. Your job is to make sure that you drive commitment and targeted action to what matters most: the execution of your strategy in this recovering economy.

We invite you to share your stories and ideas for maximizing your recovery in this economy here on the business execution blog

In business as a manager you do whatever you can to hire and develop your folks to grow into roles that you see a great fit for and have a real business need in. I think it’s safe to say that it would be a while before we figure out how to and allow ourselves to DNA test our colleagues and contractors to help assess their potential (pretty scary and far fetching thought right?!) to drive people performance.

But what is really at your hands as a manager though is to drive as much performance from your people as you possibly can no matter their genetic capability. No one wants to leave work feeling completely underwhelmed or go celebrate some work done if you don’t feel that you did your best. You are a coach and a manager that can and should set up for ultimate performance for your team members. Get your people to feel that they left all they had on the field that day. People want to perform and you as a manager no matter at what level – even when you manage and coach yourself – should set up for this.

A while ago I learned about some of the best research into how you actually drive real people performance. Learnings from high pressure organizations, sports, art and other high performance environments. Elkiem who has studied thousands of high performers and SF Research then recently partnered up to help accelerate their research findings into the hands of people that are accountable for driving people performance in their organizations – and who isn’t?

Look at this paper – Leaders Drive Productivity -  and get some insight on how you could drive better people performance from creating high performance environments  in your organization.

What do the greatest companies all have in common?  You got it — the ability to focus their organization on strategy execution by ensuring that each individual is working (i.e., executing) on goals that matter to the organization.  What type of goals “matter?”  Put simply, only the ones that have a direct line back to the Strategy sitting in a binder on the CEO’s bookshelf.

We’re just researching what impact we have on our customer’s ability to communicate strategy and execute new directions faster. The early results are very intriguing and positive – and we promise to share them when we finalize our research.   The timing is also significant as the economy has forced companies to be agile and demands that companies be able to shift their strategy (and subsequent execution) at a much more rapid pace than in a bull market.

The thing that struck me when doing some desktop research was that even though we know that 85% of performance is due to execution, the amount of content available is unbelievably skewed towards strategy — a simple web search on “Business Strategy” returns 3X more hits than “Business Execution”  (80M hits vs. 24M hits).   The term strategy execution returns only 3.5M hits.

The good news is that the “worm is turning.”   Execution is the topic du jour – maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s just the natural evolution of business.   Regardless, you can put us squarely on the “Business Execution” team, and we’re looking forward to sharing our results soon.

After all, Execution is the name of the game to drive financial results