Consulting firm Accenture surveyed 425 senior executives at the world’s largest companies in all major industries and geographies. It’s clear from the results that the war for talent is in high gear.

Top Issues for Senior Executives

1. Attracting and retaining skilled staff – 35%
2. Changing organizational culture and employee attitudes – 33%
3. Acquiring new customers – 32%
4. Developing new processes and products to stay ahead of the competition – 29%
5. Increasing customer loyalty and retention – 29%
6. Managing risk – 29%
7. Improving workforce performance – 28%
8. Increasing shareholder value – 27%
9. Using IT to reduce costs and create value – 27%
10. Being flexible and adaptable to rapidly changing market conditions – 26%

BOTTOMLINE: Regardless of size of company, senior leaders are concentrating on top issues that include people performance management (#1 and #7), organizational learning (#2),  business process improvement (#4 and #9) — ALL of which are core benefits of the Six Disciplines strategy execution program.

Alignment is a underrated and priority for leaders, particularly aligning the individual objectives of the managers and experts with the organization’s strategic priorities.

Alignment of individual team member accountability can even be a source of competitive advantage.

The key questions to ask when aligning your resources include:

1. Are you sure that your frontline experts are working on the right priorities?
2. Are they able to define their own role in line with these priorities?
3. Are you sure that your frontline experts have the right competencies?
4. How do you motivate your people to take initiative for continuous improvement?
5. How do you increase and measure their accountability?
6. How do you reward accountability and engagement?

SUGGESTION:Discipline III. Align Systems, is all about aligning processes, policies, measures, technologies and people with the strategic intitiatives of the organization.

From an article in Fortune Magazine’s “Secrets of Greatness” series: “What it takes to be great“

The premise?

• Your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant – talent has little or nothing to do with greatness.
• You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years.
• Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well.

How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields.

The conclusions:

• The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better

What’s missing?

• It’s what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

How do we transfer this to business?

• Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements – you can practice them all.
• Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

The missing elements? Attitude. Mental discipline. Feedback & Learning

• Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer (new attitudes, new habits.)
• This difference in mental approach is vital.
• Feedback is crucial.

BOTTOMLINE: “If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few. It is available to you and to everyone.”

“Most organizations still order themselves into silos – departments, divisions, and units – with each person carrying a title and role within that silo.”

Our workload, unfortunately, does not shift accordingly. We continue to fulfill the duties of our silo, while also taking on the incremental increase in duties outside the silo. The number of people from whom you need information, cooperation, or at a minimum who you need to keep in the loop, has mushroomed. The proliferation of tasks and reports puts individuals inside the system under considerable stress. It also creates organizational inefficiency.

Successful organizations will meet the challenge. They will shift their organizational structure away from silos and align their workforce toward networks.

BOTTOMLINE: Here are five practical guidelines for understanding how to align your workforce:

1. Individuals inside the organization should be assigned tasks in relation to a project, and only provisionally in relation to a job title.
2. Distinct silos within the same organization replicate tasks unnecessarily.
3. Management must learn to trust more and exercise more consistent accountability.
4. Hold meetings only when absolutely necessary.
5. Managers should be recognized for eliminating unnecessary tasks or processes-  as well as cutting expenses.

At Six Disciplines, we encourage business leaders and all team members to look at business planning horizons using this inverted pyramid chart.

Beginning with Mission and Values, which should be decided upon early in the strategic planning process – and should be designed to last for decades.

Next is the organization’s Strategic Position, which should be the articulated as the ability to build and sustain a product or service offering that is different than that of your competition, and should be designed to last 10+ years.

Similarly, the Vision should be designed to describe how your organization will look like in 10 years, in pursuing the mission and strategic position.

Next, the Long-Term Goals of the organization (also known as the “Vital Few Objectives”) look out 3-5 years, and 1-Year Company Goals are expressed in a balanced scorecard-like fashion (with specific measures, deadlines, assigned accountability) in the categories of financial, customer, production and people.

Individual Plans are created on a quarterly basis, indicating projects, tasks and activities that each person will do in order to support the company goals.

BOTTOMLINE: It all comes down to Today.…what are you doing – TODAY – to support the organization’s goals, in order to fulfill its Long-Term Goals, Vision, Mission and Values?

If you take a look at business strategy under a microscope, you’ll find one critical element come into focus:

“Creating strategy is (relatively) easy — implementing it is very difficult.”

According to a new book, The New Social Learning, social media technologies—everything from 140-character “microsharing” messages to media-rich online communities to complete virtual environments and more—enable people to connect, collaborate, and innovate on levels never before dreamed of.

Consider these trends: 

• Baby Boomers have already begun to retire. Although the perception exists that older workers do not widely embrace technology, a recent survey by ASTD shows that 79 percent of Baby Boomers, (compared with 76 percent of Millennials) believe that social media tools are not being used enough for education activities within organizations.
• By 2014, potentially half the workforce will be from Millennials. Overall, this generation has a high comfort level with technology and broad expectations about using it to learn. The previous generation, Generation X, shares many of these expectations but has learned to navigate slow-to-change workplaces. Millennials and generations after are not as apt to put up with inefficient ways.
• Fairly soon, Generation Z will begin entering the workforce. They are even more intimate with technology and have higher expectations for instant answers and constant connectivity than Millennials.

BOTTOMLINE: It’s not all about Millennials (also known as the Net Generation and Generation Y). Many of us, their older colleagues, also find that new social technologies allow us to work in ways we never believed would happen in our lifetime. 

• Have your expectations of the workplace changed in this newly connected world? 
• Are many things the same as they were as recently as last year? 
• If you were to go to work for your company now, would you not have higher expectations than you had in the past? 

To thrive, companies not only must identify the right strategy, but must also communicate it quickly and effectively so it reaches all levels of the organization.

However, we all know that personal and cultural factors are likely to get in the way of strategy execution.

Why? Human factors: “We don’t always do what we know we should.”

Knowledge of the strategy alone does not motivate action and cause execution. Employees’ emotions and habits can always cause resistance.

Consider these four strategies to overcome the emotional and cultural challenges of achieving strategic change in your organization:

1. Employees must be confronted with the need for change. Bring them face-to-face with the realities of external and internal pressures to change. They’re much more likely to buy-in and participate in a change initiative if they understand how their work contributes to the company’s success.
2. Converted some into “change champions.” Team members who “own” and drive the change can serve as role models.
3. Manage employee feelings. Help team members deal with their emotional reactions to change and decide whether they can thrive in the new environment. Listen, listen and listen some more to determine root causes for their feelings.
4. Support the change with new tools and systems. Use incentives, recognition programs, measurement tools, monitor progress for change – all of which support the adoption of change.

BOTTOMLINE: When change initiatives are introduced in your organization, getting the people who are ultimately responsible for delivering the results involved early is a huge factor in getting commitment (“buy in”). They’ll better understand the hurdles that need to be overcome, and they’ll have more buy-in if they can have input while the change initiative is being planned. And we’re not referring to just compliance, we’re talking about commitment to the new direction.  

SUGGESTION:  Watch the short video on getting buy-in. 

Management guru Peter Drucker once said:

“The leader of the past was a person who “told”. The leader of the future will be a person who asks.”

To create a culture of excellence in your organization, do you want to know what questions to ask?

Here’s 233 Really Good Questions Leaders Should Ask.

According to a recent StrategyOne public opinion survey of 1,043 Americans” 

• Most American workers (80%) are satisfied with their jobs, but nearly two in three (64%) have strong doubts about being able to eventually stop working and retire.
• Close to half (49%) agree with the following statement: “Most meetings that I go to at the company where I work are a waste of time.

Perhaps more disturbing is that the survey also found that a surprising number of workers are disconnected from the mission of their company. 

• One-third of American workers (35%) report not caring much about their company, and say they are mainly there to get a paycheck.
• 38% report not knowing what the main mission of their organization is (other than making money).
• Almost half (44%) say their companies put corporate “values” on the wall that are mostly meaningless to them.

BOTTOMLINE: With extensive market competition in every industry, it’s absolutely imperative that companies engage their entire workforce in their mission to achieve their business goals and objectives. Employees must see their jobs as more than just collecting a paycheck, and it’s up to their employers to make sure that’s the case.