1: As CEO of Panera Bread, Ron Shaich would sometimes walk around the conference room table and stand behind one of his executives.
“Placing my elbows on their shoulders, I’d lean forward, letting them feel my weight,” Ron writes in his book Know What Matters.
“You’re going to get this done, right?” I’d ask, all the while pressing down on their shoulders. “Do you feel the weight of that responsibility?”
Why did he do this?
Because “that’s the way I want my teams to feel when they lead an initiative or take on a project.”
Yesterday, we looked at the strategic planning process at Panera, which Ron later sold for $7.5 billion, one of the largest deals in restaurant history.
Step one is to articulate a vision for the future where the organization has a true competitive advantage.
Step two involves deciding what are the two to three Key Initiatives (KIs) we will achieve this year toward our envisioned future.
“Once we have our KIs, the next question is, Who’s going to get these things done?” Ron writes.
“An initiative or project without accountability won’t get completed,” he explains. “In my companies, each initiative has both an executive sponsor who is generally accountable and an initiative leader who is personally responsible to organize, direct, and coordinate the cross-functional team working on the initiative.”
Deciding who will be accountable for delivering the Key Initiative is a critical step for success.
“In fact, my criteria (and the criteria I suggest for every CEO) when assigning key accountabilities,” he notes, “are that the CEO must have a confidence level of 80 percent or greater that the individual assigned to lead the work has the capability, wherewithal, and time to get it done.
“If we don’t have that kind of confidence in our leaders (and in my experience, CEOs often don’t), we need new team members.”
2: Another important element of the strategic planning process is deciding on the correct metrics.
How do we define “done”? How do you know we’re achieving what matters?
“Our metrics need to represent, in a concrete sense, what success looks and feels like,” Ron writes.
Interestingly, Ron does not believe that all metrics need be numbers.
To create a meaningful metric, we simply ask: “How will we judge ourselves? What can we point to as direct evidence that we are making progress on what matters?
“Who will judge us? Often, this is the more important question. How would our key stakeholders consider our progress?
“This might lead us to create a metric that is not a number, but a question with a rating scale attached.
Exhibit one: “In the eyes of ______________, to what degree have we achieved ______________?”
The stakes are high. If we are tracking the wrong metrics, we can feel successful when we’re not.
“If our goal is to have a good vacation in Florida,” Ron explains, our “metric needs to reflect whether you had a good time. Tracking how many miles we traveled doesn’t tell us if we hit our objective. Time spent in Florida doesn’t tell us.”
It’s the same in business. “Unless we have a comprehensive set of metrics that directly relate to what we’re trying to achieve,” he notes, “we could be deceiving ourselves.”
As leaders, we can give a speech and say, “We’re about 100 percent customer satisfaction,” or “We’re about serving high-quality food.”
But we are fooling ourselves if we don’t have a concrete metric to measure where we stand.
Clear ownership and clear deliverables turn intention into outcomes. That’s the final test: Did we achieve what truly matters?
3: Execution is “the missing link between aspirations and results,” Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan write in their classic book Execution.
Good execution starts with the CEO.
Last week, we explored the idea that the CEO’s most important job is to be “Innovator-in-Chief.”
“But that doesn’t mean they can neglect execution,” Ron writes. “Execution is so fundamental that it must be part of the leader’s explicit responsibilities to ensure that it’s done well.”
We must have a system that ensures execution happens. “That means having the right focus and getting the right people in the room at the right time, with the right metrics and a clear understanding of where they are in the journey,” he observes.
And while it starts at the top, everyone needs to be connected to the big picture—”to be willing and able to step out of the limited perspective of their role,” Ron shares, “and hop into the metaphorical helicopter and consider the company and its progress as the CEO might.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: For the most important initiatives in my world right now, do I know exactly who owns them and how we’ll know—with evidence—that we’ve truly succeeded?
Action: Pick one key initiative, name a single accountable owner (even if others are involved), and define 2–3 concrete metrics or questions that will tell us whether we’re actually making the progress that matters.