After coaching thousands of leaders and their teams, I’ve come to a blunt conclusion: most people are not very effective.
When I say most, I mean at least 90%.
And when I say effective, I mean consistently executing—day in and day out.
You’ve heard me say many times that success should only have two steps:
- Knowing what to do
- Doing it
If it were really that simple in practice, a lot more people would be successful at a lot more things. I could easily write a book on this topic—and I just might—but today I want to focus on the second step.
The hard part: doing it
Very few leaders and teams are great at execution. There are many reasons for this (another book), but one concept shows up everywhere I go:
People spend far too much time thinking and deciding what to do—and not nearly enough time actually doing it.
Most roles are not designed to maximize efficiency. Too much thinking. Too much task-switching. Not enough focused execution.
The symptoms are easy to spot
- Tasks get touched multiple times before they’re finished
- Too many things are in progress at the same time
- People feel busy, even burned out—but results are mediocre
You see it in:
- A help desk that feels overwhelmed yet closes half (or a third) the tickets per tech of a highly efficient team
- A sales team putting in effort without consistent sales results
- A professional services team that struggles to bill enough hours
Everyone is working full days. Very little momentum is flowing.
Unfortunately, this is the norm in many companies.
How to execute more effectively
Here’s where leaders can make a real difference:
- Design every role for efficiency. Break down the tasks and processes that make up each role. Learn what “good” looks like and define the key metrics that matter daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
- Create playbooks for proactive roles. Sales, vCIO, and similar roles should have a clear activity-to-result playbook with daily accountability. Execution thrives on clarity.
- Fix your meetings. Learn what effective meetings actually look like. Establish strong meeting rhythms that drive accountability instead of consuming time.
- Never assume people know how to be effective. Most people know how to work hard. Very few know how to work effectively—and that’s not their fault.
- End each day with tomorrow’s priorities. As a leader, write down the six most important things you need to do tomorrow. Start your morning with number one. Every time.
- Own effectiveness as a leadership responsibility. It’s your job to define what effectiveness means for each role and ensure people have the tools, processes, and clarity to succeed.
Everyone wants to do a good job. But for many team members, what “a good job” actually looks like is unclear.
Start by comparing each role in your business to best-in-class performance in your industry. Then break down the tasks and processes that make up that role until you can clearly define what an effective day looks like.
Add metrics, add accountability and add meeting rhythms.
Boom. Execution isn’t about working harder. It’s about designing the work so doing it becomes inevitable.