Once your strategic plan is in place, your local government team can then turn to executing goals. Execution is where the proverbial “rubber meets the road”. Your ability to execute with focus, in a team-oriented way, and with urgency, accountability and openness is key to success.
There are several steps that need to be considered when attempting to implement a new strategic execution performance management system.
- Selecting a Performance Management System: Like anything important, having a way to document, measure, track, make visible and reward goal achievement is one of the first steps. We’ve looked at dozens of platforms and can guide this process.
- Buy-In and Training: Once a performance management tool has been chosen, the team then needs to buy-in to the idea (and effort) of measuring goals. This step includes both training as well as a strong voice of direction from senior leadership. Without their vocal support of this new process, things will crumble.
- Goal Formation: After training on a performance management system, there should be a process of molding existing goals and objectives to fit the new system. This workshop process is valuable as it helps department leaders re-think the idea of goals and how to form them.
- Goal Flow: Goals and objectives need to be organized in a hierarchy.
- WIGs (wildly important goals)
- City or County level strategic objectives
- Departmental goals
- Individual goals
- Goal and System Coaching: Once the goals have been ordered and inputed into the system, a series of coaching sessions should take place to insure that the new ideas and new process take hold. Without this added coaching, new participants can easily get frustrated, get caught in the details or just give up.
Let us know if your organization wants to implement a strategic performance improvement process to help employee productivity, culture and morale.