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Our Line-of-SightSM Certified Partners help our clients execute better. Line-of-SightSM looks beyond talent to help you assess the 5 Key Success factors for Execution (let’s call them KSEs): Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and Human Capital. 

A Simple Idea to Keep Employees Focused on What Matters

This week we discuss a simple approach to align activities and structure to your business strategy in the post-pandemic.

In previous blogs, we stressed this simple truth: execution is the sum of all the activities performed by your employees. In order to achieve your long-term goals, you need to be doing the right work.

In our partners' client work, they use the Requisite Organization approach developed by Elliott Jaques, a researcher and practitioner who codified many of today’s global management practices. This method clearly defines the nature of work and relationships required across an organization in order to enable desired results.

Implemented correctly, it helps every employee understand:

• How to work with others within a defined structure

The Requisite Organization starts with stating the strategy and expected outcomes, determining what work is needed to achieve them, who is best suited to do the work, and evaluating how people need to work together. This clarity leads to increased employee engagement (since employees better understand the relation between their work and overall goals), greater focus, and higher productivity.

The improvement process starts at the top and works its way down to every level of the organizational structure, resulting in every role knowing who, what, why, and how work should be done. This approach is obviously selective: our Certified Partners use Line-of-SightSM diagnostic data to identify where in the organization the lack of clarity or alignment of tasks is bogging down execution. Their improvement work therefore focuses only on these areas. They do not intervene in parts of the company where execution scores are satisfactory.

Their improvement work often brings to light the “silo effect” - lack of coordination between different parts of the organization. As discussed in a previous blog, product or service issues generally happen at organizational breakpoints: at these points, lack of communication, lack of clarity on objectives, or even conflicting goals express themselves in poor delivery. With the Requisite Organization approach, our Certified Partners can identify and remove these breakpoints.

As we head into a post-pandemic period, partners expect to see lower scores than usual for Activities and Structure when they conduct the initial Organizational Health scan on new clients. This is due to the pivot in strategy and operations that many companies had to perform in 2020. From what they are seeing so far, the adaptation of organization structures and job definitions have lagged behind, creating friction and taxing productivity. Our Certified Partners anticipate this area to be a major area of improvement for their clients in 2021.

To learn more about enhancing your own execution,

please reach out to one of our Certified Partners

, and they will initiate an assessment of your execution capabilities.

How to keep employees focused on what matters.

This week we discuss a simple approach to align activities and structure to your business strategy in the post-pandemic. Previously, we stressed this simple truth: execution is the sum of all the activities performed by your employees. In order to achieve your long-term goals, you need to be doing the right work.

The economic recovery in 2021 will put a premium on execution. Why? Because the operating environment will be more stable and predictable. 2020 was the year of big strategic changes; in 2021, you just need to execute well.

However, how do we even know how well our organizations are currently executing? Financials cannot give the full picture since they don’t tell us how much better we could perform.

Many of our Line-of-SightSM Certified Partners are also talent optimization consultants because they have a passion for execution - after all, you can only execute through your people. But there is more to execution than human capital. 

Line-of-SightSM helps mid-market companies to large enterprises execute better. It looks beyond talent to help you assess the 5 Key Success factors for Execution (let’s call them KSEs): Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and yes, Human Capital. 

This week represents our third in a series of short tips on execution, Every week we will discuss how you can improve each of these five KSE’s.

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A set of well-chosen metrics allows employees to understand exactly how their activities are going to be tracked and how their output will be aggregated into successful execution. In other words, good metrics will foster the right behaviors to execute. Depending on your strategic intent, these behaviors may lead your organization to innovate (by fostering collaboration), to reduce costs (by systematically rooting out inefficient processes), or to deliver outstanding service (by measuring client satisfaction for example).

Regardless of your strategy, you control what you measure. And if employees know what you control, they will adapt their behavior accordingly.

The reality is different. In our work helping clients to improve their execution capabilities, we often see inefficient metrics such as:

● A dashboard that includes useless metrics added over time, but no longer relevant
● Some measurements may be “vanity metrics” which are designed to always deliver positive values and cast their owners in a positive light
● Dashboard are shared only with executives and managers
● Budgets may progressively drift away from alignment with the strategy, especially if you do not use Zero-Based-Budgeting and budgets are carried over year after year without substantial, critical review

Answer the questions below. If you answer “No” at least once, you may need to review your current metrics to make sure they support your strategy execution.

● Do you systematically consider and act on every metric you track?

● Do your employees have full access to the metrics that track their activities?

● Are your metrics out of date when it comes to guiding today’s work?

● Is your budget fully aligned with your strategic priorities?

When we help clients achieve execution excellence, we focus on metrics early - as soon as the strategic intent has been clarified. We promote good metrics hygiene based on simple guidelines:

First, metrics have to track all the key drivers for execution. There is a massive body of research on balanced scorecards and we encourage clients to consider all of the elements of their strategy while focusing in on their key drivers for execution.

Most of our interventions include the removal of irrelevant or outdated metrics that no one dared to remove until now.

Second, the leaders’ role is to communicate their strategic intent broadly; it is also to make the underlying metrics equally visible and accessible to all. At a minimum, they should report on company-wide metrics once a month.

Let’s use a bowling alley analogy: what if the pins were hidden behind a curtain? How would you adjust your aim and technique? Employees need to keep a score of how well they are performing. In other words, remove the curtain and let them adjust their aim accordingly.

Third, employees should be empowered to act on the metrics that track their activity. People fundamentally want to perform well; this requires the ability to assess their own impact and the opportunity to improve and develop.

Finally, budgets should be just as consistent with the strategic intent as operational metrics. Just like metrics, budgets tend to inflate over time or become disconnected from business goals if they are not regularly re-assessed against the strategy. No manager likes to see their budget cut, but that discipline is essential to remain focused on the essential strategic intent.

In our next blog, we will consider the impact of a well-designed organizational structure and focused activities on your ability to execute well. How well is your business executing? To find out, 

please reach out to a Line-of-Sight Certified Partner

 to initiate an assessment of your execution capabilities.

A set of well-chosen metrics allows employees to understand exactly how their activities are going to be tracked and how their output will be aggregated into successful execution. In other words, good metrics will foster the right behaviors to execute.

EXECUTING IN THE POST PANDEMIC WORLD: Balanced Metrics

Line-of-SightSM helps companies execute better by measuring and managing five critical capabilities necessary for successful execution (or KSEs): strategic understanding, leadership, balanced metrics, activities & structure, and human capital; it also assesses market discipline - the ability to execute in a way that remains true to the strategic intent. These factors are aggregated to form an overall Organizational Health index measured on a scale from 0 to 100.

In our always-on world, burnout has long been a reality. But in 2020 burnout and chronic stress became rampant as a third of U.S. employees started “living at work” and faced threats to their health, economic insecurity, and concerns for their loved ones.

Although the concept of occupational burnout originated in the 1970s, the medical community has long argued about how to define it. In 2019 the World Health Organization finally included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”

This language acknowledged that burnout is more than just an employee problem; it is an 

 problem that requires an organizational solution.

With support from Harvard Business Review, Jennifer Moss gathered feedback from more than 1,500 respondents in 46 countries, in various sectors, roles, and seniority levels, in the fall of 2020. Sixty-seven percent of respondents worked at or above a supervisor level.

89% of respondents said their work-life was getting worse.

56% said their job demands had increased.

62% of the people who were struggling to manage their workloads had experienced burnout “often” or “extremely often” in the previous three months.

57% of employees felt that the pandemic had a “large effect on” or “completely dominated” their work.

25% felt unable to maintain a strong connection with family, 39% with colleagues, and 50% with friends.

Only 21% rated their well-being as “good,” and a mere 2% rated it as “excellent.”

For leaders, the key learning is simple: they made things worse.

They often tried to compensate for the physical distance by intensifying the scrutiny of employees’ work, or they expected people to forge ahead without acknowledging the stress that their employees (or themselves) were experiencing.

As we ease into the post-pandemic, the crisis offers lessons and best practices to not go back to the old ways, and save our employees and our companies from the personal and business cost of burnout:

Overwork was the most cited reason for burnout. Research from Gallup has shown that the risk of occupational burnout increases significantly when an employee’s workweek averages more than 50 hours and rises even more substantially at 60 hours. The average workday is now 48 minutes longer compared to pre-pandemic data.

Leaders must give people more control and flexibility

The pandemic brought employees a host of new challenges. Childcare options were limited, parents were grappling with homeschooling children while working from home and dealing with increased household chores resulting from suddenly having everyone under the same roof 24/7. In the post-pandemic, employees who work fully or partially remotely will continue to face some of these challenges; and those who embrace virtual work for this flexibility will value having more control anyway.

We talk about Zoom meeting burnout as if it is a new thing, but we have had meeting fatigue forever. The amount of time employees spend in meetings has increased by 13%. According to Steven Rogelberg of UNC Charlotte, who wrote 

, pre-Covid-19 studies showed that about 55 million meetings a day were held in the United States alone and that U.S. organizations wasted $37 billion annually because most meetings were unproductive.

Leaders must learn to recognize the extent of people’s struggles.

Leaders must create psychological safety in their organizations so that employees feel allowed and supported to talk about their mental health at work. This means leaders themselves must lead the way and be role models for the behaviors they want to encourage. This is a challenge for many leaders, who believe they must show toughness to be respected. In fact, the opposite will happen - respect will come from showing up as an authentic leader.

Leaders must remind employees of their strategy and purpose

Business strategy is supposed to be what unites employees around a shared purpose. As companies pivot again to post-pandemic strategies, now is the time to revisit and communicate broadly about the strategy: not only will it clarify the value proposition of the company, it will also create an anchor point and a sense of purpose for employees, and a way to connect again with their peers after a year when distance and remote work frayed social networks.

If there was an area where we don’t want to go back to the “old”, it is employee stress. Leaders can take advantage of the relatively fresh start of the post-pandemic to create the right organizational environment for employees to thrive and for their organizations to avoid the cost of burnout. Upcoming blogs will mine Line-of-SightSM execution data to provide actionable advice for leaders seeking to maximize their organization’s execution capabilities. 

In our always-on world, burnout has long been a reality. But in 2020 burnout and chronic stress became rampant as a third of U.S. employees started “living at work” and faced threats to their health, economic insecurity, and concerns for their loved ones. Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it is an 

Employee Burnout - Don’t Do it Again

Many of our Line-of-SightSM Certified Partners are also talent optimization consultants because they have a passion for execution - after all, you can only execute through your people. But there is more to execution than human capital.

Line-of-SightSM helps mid-market companies to large enterprises execute better. It looks beyond talent to help you assess the 5 Key Success factors for Execution (let’s call them KSEs): Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and yes, Human Capital.

This blog represents our fifth in a series of simple tips on execution. Every week we discuss how you can improve each of the five KSEs.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Human Capital: Once You Get ‘Em, How Do You Keep Them?

You execute with people and through people. Employees are your most precious asset, but they are also the one asset over which you have the least control. Employees walk out of your facilities at the end of each workday and many of them have not even been physically in the office in the past 9 months.

In addition, the pandemic created an unusual dynamic as voluntary turnover abated during 2020 and many employees hunkered down, so that we expect a massive talent exodus in 2021, once GDP growth is firmly established and changing jobs becomes less risky than it was last year.

Even if you are the lucky recipient of that talent, this will raise your retention stake even higher: the crisis showed employees what good crisis leadership and a supportive culture looked like, and they will expect the same going forward even when the pandemic dissipates. So how will you retain your talent and ensure it drives your execution?

Answer the questions below to assess if your human capital is powering or hindering your ability to execute.

Are your managers fully aware of the motivational needs of their team members?

Is your organization fully able to attract and retain your top talent?

Are your development, learning, and training programs fully aligned with your business strategy?

Is knowledge widely shared across the organization?



If you answered “No” at least once, your talent is disrupting your execution and the success of your business strategy is at risk.

Managers play an outsize role in the motivation and retention of employees. Bad bosses are the #1 reason why employees leave organizations. You can counter that risk by training your managers to be self-aware and aware of the behavioral drives and needs of their team members. The Predictive Index is one of the behavioral assessments that can be used for that purpose; regardless of the tool, you will maximize retention if your managers apply the “platinum rule” and lead their employees the way employees want to be led.

Self-aware managers are key to retaining employees. To attract them in the first place, consider the fundamental premise of talent optimization: having the right people in the right jobs. Harness the power of objective data to hire people who have the right behavioral profile for the position you are filling. Skills can be taught, but behaviors cannot change. Get it right the first time.

The pace of change keeps increasing across all industries. The competencies you need from individual employees keep evolving to ensure effective execution. Therefore, ongoing training is more critical than ever, both for technical skills and for “soft” skills including leadership development. Your training and development must align with your strategy, meaning it must anticipate your needs 12 to 36 months ahead. Companies increasingly develop competency maps and use their L&D program to develop current employees in addition to hiring externally.

Finally, employees will execute well if they freely exchange information. Knowledge sharing contributes to personal growth and powers innovation (not just new product development like Apple), but the sum of daily adjustments and enhanced practices that incrementally and continuously improve execution.  

In our next blog, we will consider how the pursuit of best practices in execution may actually put your market differentiation at risk. 

and we will initiate an assessment of your execution capabilities.

You execute with people and through people. Employees are your most precious asset, but they are also the one asset over which you have the least control. Employees walk out of your facilities at the end of each workday and many of them have not even been physically in the office in the past 9 months. In addition, the pandemic created an unusual dynamic as voluntary turnover abated during 2020 and many employees hunkered down, so that we expect a massive talent exodus in 2021, once GDP growth is firmly established and changing jobs becomes less risky than it was last year. Even if you are the lucky recipient of that talent, this will raise your retention stake even higher: the crisis showed employees what good crisis leadership and a supportive culture looked like, and they will expect the same going forward even when the pandemic dissipates. So how will you retain your talent and ensure it drives your execution?

Executing In the Post Pandemic World: Human Capital

2021 will put a premium on execution. Why? Because the operating environment will be more stable and predictable. 2020 was the year of big strategic changes; in 2021, you just need to execute well.

Many of our Line-of-SightSM Certified Partners are also talent optimization consultants because they have a passion for execution - after all, you can only execute through your people. But there is more to execution than human capital.

This week represents our sixth in a series of short tips on execution. Every week we discuss how you can improve each of these five KSE’s. Which one is your biggest strength? Your biggest weakness? Let’s find out. 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Market discipline is the alignment of your processes, systems, and culture with your competitive strategy.

Market discipline starts at the top: the leadership team must define the mission (why do customers buy from us versus the competition), vision (what needs to be done to deliver the value proposition), and strategic intent of the organization. Only then can processes, infrastructure, and assets be aligned.

Answer the questions below. If you answer “No” at least once, you may need to clarify your market positioning:

● Are all processes, systems, and culture reinforcing the delivery of the customer value proposition?

● Are you focused on adopting industry best practices?

● Do employees struggle to explain how your company differentiates itself in the marketplace?

Counterintuitive as it may sound, an execution risk consists of seeking to improve value delivery by adopting best practices. In many cases, this is a legitimate effort. A best practice is defined as a technique, method, process, activity, incentive, or reward that is believed to be more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique when applied to a particular condition or circumstance.

However, best practices are also defined as the most efficient (least amount of effort) and effective (best results) way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people or organizations. This means that best practices tend to level the playing field by making operations increasingly similar across industry players.

Again, this is a worthy goal when best practices apply to back-office operations to remove operational pain points. However, applied without thoughtful consideration, they can also water down the clarity of an organization’s market positioning, and progressively erase its uniqueness and differentiation.

It is therefore essential for both leaders and employees to remain crystal-clear about their market differentiation, and to execute accordingly. If widespread use of best practices by other players leads them to catch up on an organization’s market position, it is the leadership team’s duty to develop distinctive execution advantages that re-establish its lead. For example, even an organization competing on cost, like microelectronics, may still be fiercely innovative to apply innovations to its quest for continued cost reductions.

The bottom line is leaders should distinguish between best practices - that level the playing field but may erode their unique positioning - and the 

 practices - that are well-suited to the particular market positioning of an organization. Right practices will balance the delivery of best-in-class performance with tight alignment, singular positioning, and value proposition. 

In our next blog, we will focus on the importance of having Balanced Metrics.

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Market discipline is the alignment of your processes, systems, and culture with your competitive strategy. Market discipline starts at the top: the leadership team must define the mission (why do customers buy from us versus the competition), vision (what needs to be done to deliver the value proposition), and strategic intent of the organization. Only then can processes, infrastructure, and assets be aligned.

Executing In the Post Pandemic World: Market Discipline

Many of our Line-of-SightSM Certified Partners are also talent optimization consultants because they have a passion for execution - after all, you can only execute through your people. However, there is more to execution than human capital. 

Line-of-SightSM helps mid-market companies to large enterprises execute better. It looks beyond talent to help you assess the five Key Success factors for Execution (let’s call them KSEs): Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and yes, Human Capital. 

This week, we are launching a series of short tips on execution. Every week we will discuss how you can improve each of these five KSEs.

The Importance of Strategic Understanding

“True North” is taken from the Lean Lexicon and describes the ideal or state of perfection that businesses should be continually striving toward. For most businesses, the business strategy explains what their True North is.

What happens when True North is defined, but not communicated? Execution will suffer as employees perform their jobs based on different assumptions and goals. It is not uncommon for teams to pursue conflicting goals; sometimes, managers and employees form cliques that each defend a different belief about what the strategy should be, a recipe for a toxic culture. No organization is immune to this confusion: BMW’s development of electric cars was famously stymied for several years by a very public disagreement between its former CEO and its Engineering lead. 

Is your organization understanding its strategy?

Answer the questions below. If you answer “yes” at least once, you need to clarify your intent to all employees:

Does your leadership team sometimes disagree on what differentiates your business in the marketplace?

Are your employees sometimes confused about the direction the business is heading?

If we surveyed your employees, would we find some who are unable to explain your strategy?

Are teams sometimes asked to optimize conflicting goals?

As leaders, we often believe that the job is done once we have formulated our strategic plan or updated our targets. This is not true at all. The real work starts when leaders transform into evangelists for their strategic intent and repeatedly and consistently explain it. In fact, communication is not enough: what matters is UNDERSTANDING, i.e. making sure that all employees embrace the strategy. If they do not agree with it, the leadership should strive to have employees “disagree and commit”, an approach consistently applied by Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

The “True North” must be communicated up and down the organization. Otherwise, watch out for goals, strategies, or current initiatives that operate south of the equator!

It is essential that any work your company does in this area involves first defining your actions by clarifying the long-term Mission, Vision, and Strategic Intent of your business.

In our next blog, we will consider how critical leadership is to execution.

How well is your business executing? To find out,

 to initiate an assessment of your execution capabilities.

What happens when True North is defined, but not communicated? Execution will suffer as employees perform their jobs based on different assumptions and goals. It is not uncommon for teams to pursue conflicting goals; sometimes, managers and employees form cliques that each defend a different belief about what the strategy should be, a recipe for a toxic culture. No organization is immune to this confusion. Learn why communicating True North to your employees matter.

Executing In the Post Pandemic World: Strategic Understanding

The economic recovery in 2021 is putting a premium on execution. Why? Because the operating environment is getting more stable and predictable: 2020 was the year of major strategic changes but 2021 is the year when companies need to execute well to take advantage of the improved economic environment.

However, how do you even know how well your organization is currently executing? Financials cannot give the full picture since they don’t tell you how much better you could perform.

This blog is part of our series of simple tips on execution. Every blog discusses how you can improve each of the five KSEs.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Human Capital: Preparing for the Turnover Tsunami

Surveys show that between 25% and 50% of employees plan to look for a job this year and will do so as soon as the effects of the pandemic subside. Employers were experiencing high employee churn prior to the pandemic last spring, but since then, voluntary turnover reached its lowest level in nine years as employees hunkered down among high economic uncertainty. We now predict voluntary job-leaving will increase significantly in 2021 as employees resume the job searches they put off for the past year.

If you think we’ll see an uptick in turnover similar to what we’ve experienced after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, think again: the once-in-a-generation pandemic has created unprecedented circumstances that will amplify the movement of employees looking for a change, enough to call it the “turnover tsunami”.

The three waves that fuel the turnover tsunami

Executives will soon have to live with the legacy of how they managed the pandemic. For many, it will mean less than good news: 46% of employees now feel less connected with their company, and 42% say company culture has diminished since the start of the pandemic (just 21% said they are very engaged at work). Executives who neglected to keep their employees' morale up will soon see many of them walk through the door.

The other two drivers of turnover are more familiar, but have also been amplified by the pandemic: better compensation and benefits (35%) and better work/life balance (25%) are the top two reasons why employees would leave their current job (this data comes from research conducted by Toronto-based Achievers Workforce Institute).

"Through the pandemic, some companies have lost mainstays of employee engagement such as focusing on work/life balance, enacting change following employee feedback, driving recognition, and fostering company culture," said Natalie Baumgartner, chief workforce scientist at Achievers. "As remote work becomes a more permanent fixture of our lives even beyond the pandemic, it's important that employers are addressing these areas of concern in an effort to increase engagement and reduce turnover.

The pandemic crisis showed employees what good crisis leadership and a supportive culture looked like, and they will expect the same going forward even when the pandemic dissipates. So how will you retain your talent and ensure it drives your execution?

● Are your managers fully aware of the motivational needs of their team members?

● Is your organization fully able to attract and retain your top talent?

● Are your development, learning, and training programs fully aligned with your business strategy?

● Is knowledge widely shared across the organization?

If you answered “No” at least once, your talent is disrupting your execution and the success of your business strategy is at risk.

Retention is an Executive-level responsibility

There may have been a time when executives could delegate retention and hiring to HR, but this is not the case in 2021: more than ever, CxOs must hold themselves accountable for their talent strategy. Preventing the turnover tsunami in their organizations should be among their top 3 priorities this year.

CxO must be intentional with their human capital all the more as they are actually not very good at it: data collected by Line-of-Sight shows that CEO themselves rate their ability to manage Human Capital lowest among the top 5 success factors that determine execution excellence, with a score of 63 out of 100 for Human Capital vs. 69 on average for all success factors combined (and 75 for Strategic Understanding, for example).

The challenge is compounded for CxO leading high-growth companies: they rate their Human Capital management even lower, with a score of 54. In other words, the leaders who need to hang on to their talent and attract more of it are the least able to do exactly that.

This is what being intentional with Human Capital means for CxO:

1. Rapidly re-engage employees. Use the “platinum rule” and go the extra mile in leading employees the way they want to be led. Show your appreciation for the diversity of talents and behaviors by implementing platforms such as the Predictive Index that highlight every employee’s strengths. Make sure managers and the executive team are self-aware enough to meet employees’ higher expectations for leadership.

2. Listen to employees. Most people have had a tough time through the pandemic and suffered exceptional wear and tear. Run an engagement survey and take immediate action on 1-2 top issues to show you care. The pandemic has re-ordered employees’ priorities: self-fulfillment and personal development are becoming more critical, so encourage open-door exchanges, and provide career counseling and mentorship opportunities to create a supportive environment.

3. Pay attention to how much jobs have changed. In sales, customer support, product development, supply chain, the world is now very different from what it used to be. Reassess job requirements for skills and behaviors, and coach, train or re-assign employees to let them operate in their strike zone, rather than backfilling for the same roles.

4. Keep top performers engaged. high performers are the most susceptible to burnout and therefore voluntary turnover. To help A players feel valued and excited about staying, companies should focus on their career growth, offer stretch exposure and exclusive training, and be more transparent about career progression and compensation.

5. Recognize employees. The Achievers report found that 74 percent of employees want more recognition for their work. Training managers on effective recognition and holding them accountable for recognizing their teams regularly is critical to keeping employees engaged.

How well is your business executing? To find out, 

 and we will initiate an assessment of your execution capabilities.

Our Line-of-SightSM Certified Partners help their clients execute better. Line-of-SightSM looks beyond talent to help you assess the 5 Key Success factors for Execution (let’s call them KSEs): Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and Human Capital. 

______________________________________________

Preparing Human Capital for Superlearning

This week, we consider how you can keep your employees’ competencies up to date despite the shifts in the work they’ve been asked to perform since the pandemic started.

Even before the pandemic, the World Economic Forum sounded an alarm by announcing: “The world is facing a reskilling emergency. We need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030.”

That was in January 2020. At the time, the Forum was anticipating a vast disruption of work due to the continued development of touchless digital technologies, the emergence of AI, continued inroads of robots in production facilities, and radical transformation of mobility and transportation with the emergence of electric cars and trucks.

The pandemic caused a crash course in adaptation, and what was expected to take years happened in months. McKinsey’s studies have shown that countries that are ahead of the post-pandemic phases (such as China, Korea, and Singapore) do experience lasting and possibly permanent consumer behaviors; there may never be a “back-to-normal”.

Changes in demand have triggered changes in work. Retail jobs in malls are replaced by warehousing jobs in Amazon facilities. In the Economist, McKinsey think-tank researcher Susan Lund said in January, “Firms are not just going back pre-pandemic, but completely re-imagining how they work.”

Our partners are seeing this shift in their execution advisory work. Most of their clients have pivoted in their strategy or delivery, whether their performance suffered or improved due to shifts in demand. The impact has been an increasing misalignment between employees’ competencies and the changing nature of their work.

Our partners are seeing this concerning trend in their client data coming from Line-of-SightSM. Line-of-SightSM is the data tool they use in their execution work.

Our partners run an “organization health scan” to assess the baseline of their new clients. The scan measures the client's execution capabilities on a scale from 0 to 100.

Recently, a new client’s health scan showed a “Human Capital” score of 68, well below their aggregate score.

Detailed scan data revealed that employees were not receiving the training and development they needed to perform the activities the new strategy was requiring. Our partners were also seeing the beginning of another concerning trend: senior management stating that they struggled to attract and retain human capital. Our partners usually see a correlation between these two trends: when current employees lack the skills to do their job well, it often means that the organization has yet to redefine the competencies they need to succeed; that lack of clarity shows in job descriptions and during interviews and drives off talented candidates.

The post-pandemic phase will be a challenge for Learning & Development teams and for hiring teams. Or partners expect their execution interventions in the post-pandemic 2021 to help clients balance the specialization of work (hiring specialists for narrow tasks requiring deep expertise such as digital, supply chain analytics, and robotics) with resiliency and adaptability - hiring or retraining employees to be versatile and adaptable. Some are calling this “superlearning”: improving skills and capabilities at the individual, team, and organization levels and powered by data to make the workforce more flexible to change and to future crises.

and they will initiate an assessment of your execution capabilities.

Preparing Human Capital for Superlearning 

CEOs of high-growth companies rate their performance lowest among their peers

Line-of-SightSM helps mid-market companies and large enterprises execute better by measuring and managing five critical capabilities necessary for successful execution (or KSEs): strategic understanding, leadership, balanced metrics, activities & structure, and human capital; it also assesses market discipline - the ability to execute in a way that remains true to the strategic intent. These factors are aggregated to form an overall Organizational Health index measured on a scale from 0 to 100.

In the first quarter of 2021, Line-of-SightSM conducted research to measure how CEOs evaluate their organizations’ execution performance. In particular, the research compared the CEO ratings for high-growth companies (growing 50% or more year-over-year) against their peers growing at a slower clip.

This data is critical to understand how to lead companies in an unprecedented period of economic recovery: indeed, as the health of the economy improves, we see a concentration of economic activity in specific sectors: for example, spending on recreational goods increased 26% compared to what we could expect if the pandemic had not hit; computers and electronics are higher than normal by 23%; spending on cars and trucks higher by 16%. Therefore, many companies in those sectors are experiencing unusually high growth.

How are their leaders managing such fast growth? Line-of-SightSM research, based on over 100 CEO self-assessments gathered in Q1 2021, shows that high growth is taxing: CEOs experiencing the highest growth (more than 50% year-over-year) gave themselves a score of 63 in the Overall Organizational Health Index compared to an overall average score of 71 for all CEOs.

Their execution self-assessment is lower than their peers across KSEs; the biggest gaps are in Leadership (6 points lower) and Activities and Structure (9 points lower). Both gaps are understandable: high-growth demands greater mindshare from leaders, more issues to solve, more employees to hire, and more efforts to maintain the integrity of culture. In effect, high growth is akin to crisis management, when risk is high, data is scarce, and leaders have to step up.

The gap in Activities and Structure is even less surprising: when growth is fast, employees are challenged to stay focused on priorities; reporting lags behind operations, leaving employees flying blind without accurate or timely data to confirm that they are executing the most critical tasks.

The Line-of-SightSM data highlights another paradox: it is not growth that taxes companies’ execution; it is 

 growth. When comparing execution self-evaluations for high-growth CEOs vs. CEO experiencing moderate growth (between 5% and 50% year-over-year), data show even larger gaps:

● There is a 10-point gap in leadership self-assessment

● There is a 12-point gap in Balanced Metrics

● There is a whopping 13-point gap in Activities and Structure

In fact, CEOs of moderate-growth companies rate their execution 

 than the average across all CEOs; but the gap is highest compared to their high-growth peers.

We may think of moderate growth as a sweet spot for execution, if only one KSE was not lagging for growing companies, and that is Human Capital. CEOs of both high-growth and moderate-growth companies rate their execution lower than average when it comes to managing talent. When you grow, finding the right people to fit the right roles is difficult, as is onboarding then, coaching them, and developing them while the organization scrambles to allocate resources where they have the most impact. In fact, human capital is a challenge for all CEOs, as CEOs on average give themselves the lowest evaluation on this particular execution capability.

The Line-of-SightSM CEO data is a reminder for leaders to be constantly mindful of what it takes to execute well. And this is particularly critical for companies experiencing high growth. Data suggests that high-growth CEOs can improve their execution by:

● Being a self-aware leader, constantly communicating the strategy to keep the organization focused

● Giving employees the right data and reporting to measure their performance and how it ties to the strategy

● Relentlessly helping employees focus on strategic priorities and let go of secondary activities.

Upcoming blogs will focus on other insights from the CEO execution self-assessment data and continue to provide fact-based recommendations to improve execution in the post-pandemic.

The High Growth Curse

Many of our partners have become Line-of-SightSM Certified Partners to help their clients execute better. Line-of-SightSM looks beyond talent to help you assess the 5 Key Success factors for Execution (let’s call them KSEs): Strategic Understanding, Leadership, Balanced Metrics, Activities & Structure, and Human Capital. 

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