Tough Business Climate. Align goals. Focus on top performers.

I came across this timely post in the HBR Blog Network titled: What You Can Control in a Tough Business Climate.  The Beijing Drummers in the 2008 Olympics immediately came to mind.  I would encourage you to watch the first 3:45 minutes of this clip and see the awe inspiring teamwork, precision and ALIGNMENT on goals and mission.   You might ask, how many drummers were playing in the performance?  2,008.  (No coincidence)

And now, back to business.  And it all gets back to the fundamentals.  Set clear goals.  Align goals up and down the organization.  Ensure you are spending your time with your best performers. Here’s the key excerpts from HBR’s post:

Faced with less-than-ideal economic conditions now, many leaders face a similar situation.We have comparable access to people, facilities, addressable market, and existing customer base. Some of us, however, are able to eke out just that little bit extra, not by placing huge strategic bets, but by ensuring the strategy we already have in place gets executed. Aligning people and the decisions they make yields greater results…We set up and tested four hypotheses that we believe are foundations for a company’s ability to execute:

1. Setting clear goals and adjusting those goals when necessary based on changing circumstances, resulting in more frequent but more relevant goals.
2. Aligning goals throughout the organization, top to bottom and across;
3. Identifying and treating high performers differently than low performers through consistent feedback across the organization;
4. And using software at all levels to provide process support, analytics, and insights into all of the above.

We discovered that a ten percent increase in any of these four execution dimensions was associated with an increase of up to six percentage points of industry-adjusted excess shareholder return. But the two that made the biggest difference, bringing the highest returns, were aligning goals (#2) and differentiating employees (#3). In other words, executing on strategy through an aligned and high performing workforce yields substantial shareholder value.