Stratrix

Six weeks after the offsite

The offsite ended with energy and a slide of priorities. Six weeks later, the new initiative is staffed with people's spare time, the unit it depends on has its own targets for the quarter, and the budget looks like last year's with a few percent added. Nobody decided to ignore the strategy. Nothing forced anyone to act on it. Execution health shows in what moves and what stops: promises kept between units, budget and people shifted, work ended on purpose.

This check is for that moment, when you suspect execution is slipping but cannot say where. It asks twenty plain questions about what actually moves and what actually stops in your organization, scores five areas where execution commonly breaks, and tells you which one to fix first and how. You leave with a profile, a starting point and a set of answers you can compare with colleagues'.

If nothing stopped, nothing was prioritized.

Self-assessment

Execution health check

Answer for the organization you know best, as it works today, not as the plan says it should. Twenty statements, about five minutes.

  1. 1 Most managers could name something we stopped doing last year to make room for this year's priorities.
  2. 2 When a good idea falls outside our priorities, it gets turned down, and people can say why.
  3. 3 We have more than five company-wide priorities, or priorities so broad that nothing is ruled out.
  4. 4 Our priorities say what we will do, not only the revenue or margin we want.
  5. 5 When one unit depends on another, the commitment is written into both units' plans with an owner and a date.
  6. 6 Promises from other units slip about as often as promises from outside suppliers.
  7. 7 Each cross-unit initiative has one named owner who can settle disputes about the shared work.
  8. 8 A conflict between units over a strategic initiative gets a decision within weeks, not quarters.
  9. 9 In the last year, budget or headcount moved between units because the priorities changed.
  10. 10 Each strategic initiative has named people with time set aside, not just a budget line.
  11. 11 A manager could get funding for a pet project outside the priorities without much trouble.
  12. 12 Next year's budget starts from the priorities, not from this year's budget plus or minus a few percent.
  13. 13 Each strategic initiative has a written condition under which it will be stopped.
  14. 14 In the last year we stopped at least one initiative on purpose before it was finished.
  15. 15 New initiatives get added mid-year without anything coming off the list.
  16. 16 The people who ran a stopped initiative are not treated as having failed.
  17. 17 Our strategy reviews end in written decisions that move money, people or priorities.
  18. 18 Most of the time in our review meetings goes to status updates.
  19. 19 Bad news about a strategic initiative reaches the top team within weeks.
  20. 20 At least once a year we check in writing whether the assumptions behind the strategy still hold.
Start here

Why these five areas

The check looks sideways and at the budget, not at whether people have heard the strategy. That follows the argument of our strategy execution page: execution rarely fails on the way down the org chart; it fails in promises between units and in money and people that never move. Sull, Homkes and Sull's research on execution puts coordination across silos first in its headline advice 1.

  • Priorities that rule things out. Sull and colleagues suggest testing whether priorities are concrete enough by asking middle managers what they would stop doing because of them 2. A priority that stops nothing guides nothing.
  • Promises between units. Most strategic work needs more than one unit, and the units' own targets compete for the same people.
  • Money and people follow. A priority without moved resources is a request for extra effort.
  • Stopping work. Hollister and Watkins put it bluntly: if the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do, “then the essence of execution is truly not doing it” 3.
  • Reviews that change things. A review that only reports status cannot fix any of the other four.

The five areas, the statements and the score bands are our rubric. They are built from the sources above and from practice, not validated against outcomes, and a score here is not a benchmark against other companies.

In practice

Reading your profile

Ignore the overall score at first. The useful part is the shape. A strong priorities score with a weak resources score means the strategy is clear and unfunded, the pattern to worry about most, because from the top it looks like alignment. A weak stopping score with everything else middling usually means overload: too many initiatives, each a little understaffed.

If your lowest area isIt usually looks likeFirst move
PrioritiesA long list everyone agrees withWrite a stop list beside each priority
Promises between unitsInitiatives waiting on other teamsPut each dependency in both units' plans
Money and peopleNew work staffed with spare timeMove one named budget line and named people
StoppingA list that only growsStop one initiative, publicly
ReviewsMeetings that end with “thanks, everyone”End every item in a written decision
Advanced

What one person's answers can and cannot tell you

The obvious objection: a self-assessment measures the assessor. That is true, and it matters here. In Sull and colleagues' research on alignment, top executives rated their companies higher than lower-level managers did on every alignment measure in their survey 4. Nothing suggests ratings of execution are immune to the same tilt. If you sit near the top, read your score as a ceiling.

So treat your result as a hypothesis. Ask a peer in another unit and a manager two levels down to take the same check, and compare statement by statement. The disagreements are the finding. Where the top team says “mostly true” and the managers say “rarely,” you have found the gap between the strategy as designed and the strategy as lived.

The second limit is that the check cannot tell you whether the strategy is right. An organization can execute a bad strategy beautifully. Pair this check with the strategic initiatives tests, which ask whether the work deserves the resources in the first place.

In practice

What to do this month

  1. Take the check yourselfAnswer for the organization as it works, not as the plan describes it.
  2. Ask two othersOne peer in another unit, one manager two levels down. Compare answers statement by statement.
  3. Pick one areaThe lowest shared score, not your own lowest. Make the first move from the table.
  4. Put it on the review agendaBring the move to the next quarterly business review as a decision, with an owner and a date.

Execution health is not a feeling about the plan. It is a list of things that moved and things that stopped. If you cannot name both, the check has already told you where to start.

Questions

What is a strategy execution assessment?
A structured look at whether an organization turns its strategy into action: whether priorities exclude work, units keep commitments to each other, money and people move, initiatives stop when they should and reviews make decisions. This one is a 20-statement self-assessment built on Stratrix's own rubric.
Is this execution health check validated?
No. The statements, areas and score bands are our rubric, built from published research on execution and from practice, but not tested against company outcomes or benchmarked. Use it to structure a conversation, and compare answers across people rather than treating one score as a measurement.
Who should take the check?
Start with yourself, then ask at least one peer in another unit and one manager two levels down. Research on alignment found top executives rate their companies higher than managers below them do, so the differences between answers are often more useful than any single score.

Sources

  1. Sull, D., Homkes, R., and Sull, C. (2015). Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review, March 2015. The article's summary line: focus on coordinating across silos and adapting to change on the front lines.
  2. Sull, D., Turconi, S., Sull, C., and Yoder, J. (2017). Turning Strategy Into Results. MIT Sloan Management Review, September 28, 2017. Testing whether strategic priorities are concrete by asking middle managers what they would stop doing because of them; priorities as a handful of concrete, action-oriented choices rather than financial targets.
  3. Hollister, R., and Watkins, M. D. (2018). Too Many Projects. Harvard Business Review, September 2018. Opening of the article: “the essence of execution is truly not doing it”; organizations find it hard to kill initiatives and keep layering them on, overloading the levels below the executive team.
  4. Sull, D., Sull, C., and Yoder, J. (2018). No One Knows Your Strategy — Not Even Your Top Leaders. MIT Sloan Management Review, February 12, 2018. Top executives rate their company higher than lower-level managers on every measure of strategic alignment in the authors' execution survey.

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