Four Key Leadership Roles: Actualizer

As Actualizers, leaders are responsible for ensuring the execution of the developed strategies and ensuing plans and tasks.  No ideas or strategies will come to fruition without making sure things happen.  Leaders must be vigilant of execution.  They need to make sure they and others follow-through as planned.  Many great ideas fall through the cracks and many strategies remain on paper because leaders fail to ensure execution.

What does Actualizing mean?

Actualizing means both getting things done and making sure things happen.  It is both a personal and a leadership activity. Actualizing is making sure that the key responsibilities of your role as a leader get executed.  When you do, you can lead by example.  If you do not do what you are supposed to do, you will have less integrity to ask others to do their part.

What is the Actualizing challenge?

Chuck Martin and his colleagues, Dr. Guare and Dr. Dawson, recently published their latest book, Work Your Strengths.  This book is based on the results of a two-year study of 2500 individuals in hundreds of American corporations both large and small.  The study was designed to help identify the strongest and weakest of 12 executive skills that Martin and his team identified in their previous book, Smarts.  This book is fantastic — A must read!  One of most interesting findings relevant to this post is the fact that “Task Initiation” came out as a common weakness across all categories of the studied subjects.  Employees, Managers, Directors, EVP/SVP, and C-level folks all have this as a weakness.  In a nut shell, it seems that we are all procrastinators.  Thus, actualization is a big challenge.

I also read recently that a VERY small percentage of strategic initiatives are actually seen to fruition in corporate America.

If all this is true, leaders who find ways to get things done and to make them happen across their organization may have a competitive advantage!

What does Actualizing entail?

Actualizing entails identification, prioritization and organization of critical role responsibilities, tasks, and action items for self and others.  In the context of this post, I will focus on actualizing the things that will make the biggest impact on accomplishing your aims.  Aim Accomplishment Strategies produce action plans that contain the action items necessary to get your aim accomplished.  To actualize your aim, you must make sure the plan is executed.  Everyone who has to take action needs to be held accountable for their part of the plan.  Very often, aim strategies and related plans are developed and launched, but mechanisms to ensure execution are not put in place to track progress. People then get distracted or busy and fail to follow-through, or they do so off schedule.   Leaders must set a process to ensure execution.  There are several mechanisms to help do this.  Regular meetings and reports are most commonly used. There are a number of software packages that can also be used to track project and schedule progress.

Lack of good follow-up and accountability can kill accomplishment.  When people do not do what they committed to do per plan, there probably was a failure in one of the early-on activity stages.  People who did not get the importance of the aim, strategy or action items will have less impetus to do what they are supposed to do.  People who were not energized or lost their “energy” somehow, will also lose their impetus.  Lastly, if people were not properly enabled with resources or capabilities, they will also have a harder time following-through.  One of my tendencies is to set out too many things to accomplish at the same time.  This tends to confuse people and causes poor follow-through as well. Lack of clarity can be a constraint to accomplishment.  I try hard to use the vital few (80/20) principle to keep me and my team from trying too much at once.  It helps!

When things are not getting done, look first at the early-on stages and make sure people are aligned, engaged and enabled.  If they are, look at the mechanisms in place (or missing) to track progress and hold them accountable.  My experience has been that fully aligned, energized, and enabled people need little prodding to do what they are supposed to do.  That is the power of clarity, motivational force, and enablers!  Keep an eye on them and you won’t need a big hammer to get things to happen.

To be more effective in this critical role, leaders must develop an action bias and effective approaches to ensure execution from self and others.

The BEST is Yet to Come!

Epi Torres, CEO