Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy

When I see companies that don’t execute, the chances are that they don’t measure, don’t reward, and don’t promote people who know how to get things done.

A good leader ensures that the organization makes these distinctions and that they become a way of life, down throughout the organization. Otherwise people think they’re involved in socialism.

As a leader, you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge and experience—even wisdom—along the way. One of the most important parts of your job is passing it on to the next generation of leaders. This is how you expand the capabilities of everyone else in your organization, individually and collectively.

That’s coaching. It’s the difference between giving orders and teaching people how to get things done.

your aim is to ask the questions that bring out the realities and give people the help they need to correct problems.

It takes emotional fortitude to be open to whatever information you need, whether it’s what you like to hear or not.

Psychologists know that some people are limited, even crippled, by emotional blockages that prevent them from doing things that leadership requires. Such blockages may lead them to avoid unpleasant situations by ducking conflicts, procrastinating on decisions, or delegating with no follow-through.

Emotional fortitude comes from self-discovery and self-mastery. It is the foundation of people skills. Good leaders learn their specific personal strengths and weaknesses, especially in dealing with other people, then build on the strengths and correct the weaknesses.

How can your organization face reality if people don’t speak honestly, and if its leaders don’t have the confidence to surface and resolve conflicts or give and take honest criticism? How can a group correct mistakes or get better if its members don’t have the emotional fortitude to admit they don’t have all the answers?

A manager who is emotionally weak will avoid such people out of fear that they will undercut his power. His tendency will be to protect his fragile authority. He will surround himself with people he can count on to be loyal and exclude those who will challenge him with new thinking. Eventually, such emotional weakness will destroy both the leader and the organization.

AUTHENTICITY: A psychological term, authenticity means pretty much what you might guess: you’re real, not a fake.

Whatever leadership ethics you may preach, people will watch what you do.

SELF-AWARENESS: Know thyself—it’s advice as old as the hills, and it’s the core of authenticity.

SELF-MASTERY: When you know yourself, you can master yourself. You can keep your ego in check, take responsibility for your behavior, adapt to change, embrace new ideas, and adhere to your standards of integrity and honesty under all conditions.

HUMILITY: The more you can contain your ego, the more realistic you are about your problems. You learn how to listen and admit that you don’t know all the answers.

In his book, Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch freely admits he made many hiring mistakes in his early years. He made a lot of decisions from instinct. But when he was wrong, he’d say, “It’s my fault.” He’d ask himself why he was wrong, he’d listen to other people, he’d get more data, and he’d figure it out. And he just kept getting better and better. He also recognized that it’s not useful to beat other people up when they make mistakes. To the contrary, that’s the time to coach them, encourage them, and help them regain their self-confidence.

The behavior of a business’s leaders is, ultimately, the behavior of the organization. As such, it’s the foundation of the culture.

To change a business’s culture, you need a set of processes—social operating mechanisms—that will change the beliefs and behavior of people in ways that are directly linked to bottom-line results.

First you tell people clearly what results you’re looking for. Then you discuss how to get those results, as a key element of the coaching process. Then you reward people for producing the results. If they come up short, you provide additional coaching, withdraw rewards, give them other jobs, or let them go. When you do these things, you create a culture of getting things done.

We don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.

Stripped to its essentials, an organization’s culture is the sum of its shared values, beliefs, and norms of behavior.

When people, especially those at the highest levels of the company, violate one of the company’s basic values, the leader must step forth to publicly condemn those violations. Anything less is interpreted as a lack of emotional fortitude.

The competitor is out there in the marketplace, not in the next unit. Teamwork, sharing of knowledge, and cooperation are absolutely essential to winning in the market.)

Behaviors are beliefs turned into action. Behaviors deliver the results.

The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent.

We’ve seen again and again that people love to give rewards; they love to be loved. But they don’t have the emotional fortitude to give honest feedback and either withhold a reward or penalize people.

How many meetings have you attended where everyone seemed to agree at the end about what actions would be taken but nothing much actually happened as a result? These are the meetings where there’s no robust debate and therefore nobody states their misgivings. Instead, they simply let the project they didn’t like die a quiet death over time.

The inability to act decisively—which translates into an inability to execute—is rooted in the corporate culture and seems to employees to be impervious to change.

The hardware includes such things as organizational structure, design of rewards, compensation and sanctions, design of financial reports and their flow. Communication systems are part of the hardware. So is a hierarchical distribution of power, where such things as assignment of tasks and budget-level approvals are visible, hardwired, and formal.

The social software includes the values, beliefs, and norms of behavior, along with everything else that isn’t hardware. Like the computer’s software, it’s what brings the corporate hardware to life as a functioning system.

norms of behavior being rewarded. Leaders who create disproportionate awards for high performers and high-potential people are creating social software that drives behaviors: people work harder at differentiating themselves.

The contemporary corporation is complex, and each of its many parts is constantly in motion: moving structures, moving ideas, moving decisions, and moving people all responding to a moving business environment. The Social Operating System is the constant. More than anything else, it provides the consistent framework that’s needed to create common ways of thinking, behaving, and doing. Over time it transcends even deeply rooted local cultures.

You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue—one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality. Robust dialogue makes an organization effective in gathering information, understanding the information, and reshaping it to produce decisions. It fosters creativity—most innovations and inventions are incubated through robust dialogue. Ultimately, it creates more competitive advantage and shareholder value.

harmony—sought by many leaders who wish to offend no one—can be the enemy of truth. It can squelch critical thinking and drive decision making underground. When harmony prevails, here’s how things often get settled: after the key players leave the session, they quietly veto decisions they didn’t like but didn’t debate on the spot. A good motto to observe is “Truth over harmony.”

Informality is critical to candor. It was one of Jack Welch’s bywords. Formality suppresses dialogue; informality encourages it.

“The culture of a company is the behavior of its leaders. Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate. You change the culture of a company by changing the behavior of its leaders. You measure the change in culture by measuring the change in the personal behavior of its leaders and the performance of the business.”

If you look at any business that’s consistently successful, you’ll find that its leaders focus intensely and relentlessly on people selection.

Executive development needs to be a core competency. At

If you spend the same amount of time and energy developing people as you do on budgeting, strategic planning, and financial monitoring, the payoff will come in sustainable competitive advantage.

Is he conceptual and visionary? Is she articulate, a change agent, and a good communicator, especially with external constituencies such as Wall Street? They don’t ask the most important question: How good is this person at getting things done? In

if you want to build a company that has excellent discipline of execution, you have to select the doer.

if you have to choose between someone with a staggering IQ and an elite education who’s gliding along, and someone with a lower IQ but who is absolutely determined to succeed, you’ll always do better with the second person.

You’re searching for people with an enormous drive for winning. These people get their satisfaction from getting things done. The more they succeed in getting things done, the more they increase their capacity.

You can easily spot the doers by observing their working habits. They’re the ones who energize people, are decisive on tough issues, get things done through others, and follow through as second nature.

Decisiveness is the ability to make difficult decisions swiftly and well, and act on them. Organizations are filled with people who dance around decisions without ever making them. Some leaders simply do not have the emotional fortitude to confront the tough ones. When they don’t, everybody in the business knows they are wavering, procrastinating, and avoiding reality.

Few tough issues are more challenging for indecisive leaders than dealing with people they’ve promoted who are not performing.

People who can’t work with others reduce the capacities of their organizations. They don’t get the full benefit of their people’s talents, and they waste everybody’s time, including their own.

Following through ensures that people are doing the things they committed to do, according to the agreed timetable. It exposes any lack of discipline and connection between ideas and actions, and forces the specificity that is essential to synchronize the moving parts of an organization.

The first things I look for are energy and enthusiasm for execution. Does the candidate get excited by doing things, as opposed to talking about them? Has she brought that energy to everything she’s done, starting with school? I don’t care if she went to Princeton or to Podunk State; how well did she do there? Is her life full of achievement and accomplishment?

What does this person want to talk about? Does she talk about the thrill of getting things done, or does she keep wandering back to strategy or philosophy? Does she detail the obstacles that she had to overcome? Does she explain the roles played by the people assigned to her? Does she seem to have the ability to persuade and enlist others in a mission?