Talking: most of us have little difficulty with that. The problem is communicating.

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	Jim Stroup

Similarly, we all know that execution is the key to organizational success, but we are constantly struggling with it as well. Why is that?

A key reason is that we so often treat management issues in isolation, as distinct factors that can be addressed, comprehended, and mastered one by one and then performed, independently, as necessary. Indeed, doing more than one at a time is sometimes considered multi-tasking!

But the fact is that many of your tasks as a manager cannot be properly understood except in the context of others and cannot be properly performed except in concert with those others. And communication and execution, in the broadest senses, are two of these.

Same sheet of music. We'll begin with something we can all agree with: communication is not a one-way process. It's not just you talking and someone else listening.

Let’s take the simplest example of communication's importance to execution-giving instructions. If you're not listening, how do you know that your directions were understood? If you simply exit your office to issue orders and then withdraw behind closed doors, you are, at best, merely talking the talk. Until you get out and stay out, learning and listening, you're not walking the walk-you know neither what effect you are really having nor what your organization is really doing.

Listening to your staff helps confirm that they understand specific tasks and general policies. That's a fundamentally important-and surprisingly poorly conducted-basic step. But it's not enough to ensure the most-efficient execution. You need to remain alert and open to information about how those instructions are playing out as they are affected throughout the organization. Feedback like this enables you to better understand and refine the process of execution in your company.

Verbal communication-down and up-of this sort is key to making certain that instructions are both informed and understood-and, of course, executed.

But it's still not enough. Communication must be horizontal, cross-departmental-even extra-organizational-to truly be effective in honing the ability to execute. Members of your firm must be able to collaborate as meaningfully as possible at the lowest level possible, across all types of boundaries, in order to most forcefully affect organizational goals.

Moreover, you need to communicate beyond organizational boundaries with customers, the community in general, and even (appropriately) with competitors. This is not merely letting people know about your products or signaling your intentions to rivals (again, appropriately). It is listening and learning and then drawing lessons from that to apply to the process-and even the very nature-of execution back within your organization. Let's turn to that now.

Staying in tune. The most straightforward way to look at what we mean by execution is to see it as the act of carrying out a plan. We'll restrict ourselves to this, then: we will look at execution as the set of things we do to give expression to the organization's plan for accomplishing its goals.

How does communication help us with that? After all, we're not considering here that we might influence the aims the plan is intended to accomplish or even its content-all we're addressing is how we do what the plan that we receive from higher up says we should do. What's there to talk about?

Consider this assertion: execution without communication is impossible, and communication without execution is pointless. At bottom, this means that all communication that takes place within your organization should ideally be either directly or indirectly about carrying out the plan.

Directly. This covers vertical instructions and feedback and horizontal collaboration aimed at doing the work of the plan. Making sales, transmitting orders, coordinating logistics, producing and delivering products or services, and even conducting after-sale follow-through could all be considered this sort of communication.

Note that a lot of this is easily recognizable as traditional, top-down managerial direction. But it includes (ideally) feedback in the opposite direction to inform and refine future instructions, collaboration at the lowest possible level to carry them out, horizontal and cross-boundary coordination, and extra-organizational consultation and planning with customers and vendors.

Indirectly. In order to be able to engage in the communication that enables specific actions directly related to execution of the strategic or operational plans of the organization, we need to attend to some infrastructure. We need to have some sort of construct (physical plant or virtual) within which work can be accomplished. We need equipment, staff, human resources functions, training, maintenance, and the like.

Now, the point here is that the communication that enables all of this is driven by the need to direct, coordinate, and support the process of execution. Unfortunately, there is little discipline exercised in modern organizations regarding this, and the understanding of it is ill disciplined as well.

As a manager concerned (albeit perhaps indirectly) with execution, you should always bear in mind that communication is not of organizational value in and of itself. It is only so if it is done with purpose, and that purpose must be married to accomplishment of the organization's plan.

Mind you, there is certainly going to be social interaction at work. Work itself, and the social contact that takes place there, are fundamental components of our feelings of self-worth. Moreover, to some extent, formal support of this is essential to the creation of an environment in which people are able to develop confidence and trust, which permit their collaborations in their corporate purposes for being there.

But the odd thing that so often happens is that we find organizations where communication doesn't exist, or is dysfunctionally constrained, or where there is a surfeit of it, and it is dysfunctionally aimless. Your bias should be to open the gates of communication, but as a manager, you need to study and shape it so that it serves the purpose for which it exits.

Often, just watching your employees' natural instincts as they go about their work will give you the best ideas in this regard. Using a “pave-the-paths” style used in landscaping architecture, you can construct-or widen-avenues of communication that they are already using, or are attempting to use, to execute the plan.

But be sure the communication you open up in your organization facilitates execution rather than is irrelevant to it or is even a confusing distraction.

Striking the right chord. It is your goal to set up a mutually beneficial, positive feedback loop between communication and execution in your organization. But note also that it's not just about you-it's about you, as a manager, establishing an environment and procedures that enable everyone in the organization to use communication to enhance their contributions to execution and to feed what they learn, while so doing, back into the process in order to improve it.

Now that's walking the walk-that's managing to execute.

About the Author:

Jim Stroup is an international management consultant specializing in organizational leadership and strategic planning. Learn more at www.managingleadership.com/blog.

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