3 Little Known Daily Management Mistakes which may be crippling your Execution

In this week’s issue, I’ll break down 3 common mistakes which I’ve seen cripple execution in operational teams as they work to run the business. These 3 mistakes come from years of leading multi-site teams and assessing operations in 3 different continents

In an environment of ever-increasing and easily available data, I’ll share some simple perspectives on where I’ve seen the potential of daily management KPIs not realized to their full extent.

By avoiding these mistakes, you’ll maximize your opportunities to enable your teams to deliver results for your organization.

Unfortunately, some operating leaders are too focused on the availability of KPIs and not the operating behaviors necessary to affect those KPIs so as a result more time is spent “reading the news versus making the news”.

Having KPI Data is Not Enough

Here are the 3 common mistakes I’ve seen commonly made.

Mistake 1: The KPIs are not cascaded deep enough in the organization.

The failure mode is when KPI(s) are not translated to team members at the level where the work actually happens.

• Too often, organizational KPIs stop at the manager or team leader level.

• It’s often assumed somehow that will be broken down to individual team members. Unfortunately, that does not happen in so many cases

• Even worse, the data is not available to the frontline teammates so they don’t know how they impact the larger picture.

Mistake 2: There are no formal huddles at the level where the point of action is occurring to review them

Having available data does not mean anyone is looking at or acting on it.

• In many cases, without a formal system, teams typically will not manage that KPI at the point of action

• This means, the teams will not have opportunities to see whether they are winning or losing often enough to make adjustments

• This means the organization misses out on many opportunities to achieve its objectives.

• The excuse you’ll most often hear is people are too busy. The consequence of that over time is such teams stop embracing reality and become comfortable with the status quo.

• Over time results decay to a point, where it becomes a major project to bring it back in line.

Mistake 3: Reasons for misses are not captured so it becomes a project when the metric is out of control

Too many teams spend too much time on what happened and almost no time capturing why it happened when it happened. This is crippling because:

• The problems are not addressed when they are small by the local team

  • They also may not have the proper problem-solving training to address small problems

• Which then results in big projects to “help” when the performance deteriorates

• Which takes teams away from executing daily

• and when the “help” leaves, sometimes the performance deteriorates again.

Many will read this and conclude these mistakes happen because of poor leadership. That may be true. My sense though is avoiding these mistakes at scale is more about creating better leadership operating systems so that outcomes are more transparent and consistent.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week!

Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help:

1. Access Weekly Actionable Tips by joining my Saturday reflections.

   • I reflect on my journey managing and leading operational teams and share lessons I’ve learned along the way in a 2-3 minute post every weekend

2. Unlock quick tips by following me on LinkedIn.

   • I share 5-6 short posts tied to each of my actionable tips every weekend.