Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2013 | Page 18
Grow Market Lead
The focused
ceo
By Keith Gerson
Where’s Your Focus?
And does anybody else know about it?
Keith Gerson has spent more than 35 years
in franchising in many different sales, development, and leadership positions. Now at
FranConnect as president of global operations, he has agreed to combine his personal
experience with FranConnect’s franchising
database to write about franchisor/franchisee
relations, growth, culture, technology, and
more in an ongoing column.
A
s we approach the new year,
many of us are finalizing our
strategic plans and budgets.
We’ve spent countless hours
ensuring that every ounce of discipline,
creativity, and resources has gone into
the effort. Yet, despite an ever-improving
economy, too many CEOs will not have
achieved the top-line revenue growth
they budgeted for 2013. In a CEO survey
conducted by FranConnect, 58 percent
reported that they were not achieving
their financial goals. So what will make
2014 any different?
Common wisdom suggests that a
slowdown in top-line revenue growth
says it’s time to rexamine your strategy.
But assuming that revenue shortfalls
are indicative of a flawed plan is, more
times than not, erroneous.
In a key study of organizational change,
the global management consulting firm
Bain & Company reported these findings:
• About 65 percent of initiatives
required significant behavioral change
on the part of front-line employees—
something that franchisees and managers
often fail to consider or plan for.
• Only 15 percent could name even
one of the top three goals their leaders
had identified. The other 85 percent
named what they thought were the goals,
but that often didn’t remotely resemble
what their leaders had said.
• Only 51 percent could say they
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were passionate about the team’s goal,
leaving almost half the team simply going through the motions.
• A staggering 81 percent of those
surveyed said they were not held accountable for regular progress on the
organization’s goals; and that the goals
were not translated into specific actions
(87 percent had no clear idea what they
should be doing to achieve the goals).
No wonder execution is so inconsistent.
In short, people weren’t sure what
the goals were, were not committed to
them, didn’t know what to do specifically to achieve them, and weren’t being
held accountable for them.
We see evidence that these same trends
are occuring in franchising. Consider
that in our CEO survey, 46 percent of
respondents acknowledged that they did
not have their strategic plans in writing
and shared with their management teams;
and 25 percent of respondents did not
have a clear vision/mission statement
in writing and shared. An additional 25
percent did not have clear core values
used for hiring, reviewing, rewarding, and
terminating. Each of these is a critical
step in getting everyone aligned without wasting sales or operational energies
on activites not useful to the business.
Another critical metric from our CEO
survey that can contribute to issues in
engagement and execution of strategies
is that 25 percent did not have detailed
job descriptions. Also, 38 percent did
not have a formal evaluation method.
It’s all about performance
Achieving engagement and execution
of strategic plans boils down to learning how change in human behavior is
accomplished by having closed-loop
mechanisms and by holding people accountable. At the end of the day, it’s all
about performance. Here are several
behavior-modifying best practices for
making 2014 your best year ever (with
a nod to the business book The Four
Disciplines of Execution.)
• Focus on the one or two goals that
will make all the difference, instead of
giving mediocre effort to dozens of goals.
• In determining your most critical
goals, don’t ask, “What’s most important?” Instead, begin by asking, “If every
other area of our operation remained at
its current level of performance, what is
the area where change would have the
greatest impact?”
• Identify and track data on leading
measures (those that are predictive of
achieving your goals) that make a difference, instead of on lagging measures
(which tend to occur too late to do anything to influence the outcome).
• People play differently when they
keep their own score and have the results tracked on a compelling and visible scorecard—to remind, motivate,
and create accountability.
• Get in the habit of meeting regularly—and frequently—with any team
that owns or has a stake in the one or
two critical goals you’re focused on. Have
these meetings no less than weekly, but
keep them short. These meetings are
about accountability for results.
• At the very least, meet with your
team and your franchisees, asking each
individual one simple question: “What
is the one thing you can do this week
that would have the most impact on the
scorecard?”
Great teams know at every moment
whether or not they are winning. They
must know—otherwise they wouldn’t
know what to do be winning.
At the end of the day, strategic planning is the ante. The ultimate aim is not
just to get results, but to create a culture
of executional excellence. n
Keith Gerson is president of global oper ][ۜ