3 Human Errors Causing the “Last Mile” Execution Gap
Sometimes it’s best to think of a business like a living entity.
It’s always in motion, running around trying to get things done. And just like any other living being, the business will eventually look for shortcuts to accomplish its goals. Some of those paths may increase efficiency in the short-term, but before long, they degrade the organization’s ability to execute—especially in the “last mile.”
The term “last mile execution gap” is a nod to the shipping industry, where the last mile of delivering a product to its destination is always the most difficult and often eats up half the total shipping costs.
Within an organization, strategic initiatives face the same problems. It’s the execution of the initiative at the ground level—the “delivery”—where breakdowns occur and the initiative falters.
There are plenty of reasons why this happens, but I want to focus on three “shortcuts” business leaders often take that cause issues in the last mile.
1. Letting the message trickle down.
The CEO of a 10-person company can sit down in a room with the entire company and explain a strategic initiative, how it affects each person, and how everyone is going to work together to accomplish it.
The CEO of a 10,000 person company doesn’t have the same luxury. Any strategic initiative must be diffused through layers upon layers of organizational hierarchy. People assume the message about the new initiative will make its way down to middle management and the subsequent rank and file, which sets off the corporate version of the telephone game—the message gets altered or degraded as it passes through each layer.
By the time it reaches the employees who will be executing the nuts and bolts of the initiative, the fidelity of the message has been lost.
A lot of companies believe their project management tools will take care of strategic communication and execution at lower levels. But moving a card from column to column tracks progress. It doesn’t communicate someone’s role in an initiative or outline how to execute what they need to.
Instead, leaders need a platform to clearly communicate an initiative at all levels of the company, so the employees who execute on it aren’t working with a watered down understanding of the initiative. Ideally, leaders will be able to measure traction in real time to make execution modifications throughout an initiative’s timeline. And employees need the key understandings, tools, and resources to execute against the initiative requirements.
2. Projecting confidence based on prior success.
Humans have a strong tendency to assume that past success is indicative of future results. In the markets, this assumption can lead to poor returns. Within an organization, the same cognitive bias can lead to a disastrous initiative rollout.
Let’s say there’s a general manager you’ve worked with before, and you’re considering having them spearhead a new initiative. They’ve done well on past projects—maybe developing a leadership framework, for instance—and you enjoy working with them.
That’s often enough to create the perception that once you share the information they need, everything will take care of itself. They performed well last time they were handed a project, so you take a cognitive shortcut—you assume they’ll perform well this time, too.
Unfortunately, using that shortcut may give you a level of confidence in them that’s unwarranted given the type of initiative you’re about to hand over. A product release, for example, may be completely different from the leadership framework initiative they developed, but you presume their abilities will transfer regardless.
The solution here is simply to recognize we all have a tendency to take this shortcut. Just because someone has done well in one domain doesn’t mean they have the skills to do well in another domain. People have different strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to evaluate those carefully as a senior leader, rather than making a gut decision based on past performance.
3. Assuming incompetence based on previous perceptions.
Similar to our faith that high-performance people will do well on any task, we also tend to feel that some people can’t do anything well.
This assumption may be a reality, but probably less than you think. Maybe a certain team or individual didn’t live up to expectations in the past. However, studies have consistently shown that more than half the variation in an employee’s ratings was explained by the individual doing the rating. Basically, we’re all lousy at understanding who has potential and who is incompetent.
That bias leads to another problematic shortcut within organizations. Instead of trying to understand why a team or individual isn’t performing well, leaders within the organization develop a workaround—they simply avoid working with those people unless it’s absolutely necessary.
The best thing you can do if you recognize this bias is go straight to the data. Often, the feelings leaders have about certain groups or teams either isn’t born out by the data, and when it is, it may have been due to a lack of understanding on the part of the team. At MindStrength, almost all organizations at launch tell us they know who is and isn’t going to perform well within the organization. That’s bias at play. Usually, we don’t find a group of people who can’t execute, but a group who wasn’t given a chance to properly understand and interact with the initiative. That’s why we rely on an unbiased measure, the Traction Index, to evaluate both individual employees and entire teams.
People—especially executives—are wired to look for shortcuts and faster, more efficient ways of doing things. But when it comes to executing long-term strategic initiatives, the shortcuts lead to poor execution and problems in the last mile.
Akhil Kohli is the CEO and founder of MindStrength, the preeminent initiative execution platform for Fortune 500 and mid-size companies. MindStrength's Initiative Platform enables companies to execute against strategic initiatives at scale and with accountability at all levels of the organization.