Seth Godin, the American author and former dot com business executive writes in feedblitz.com:
‘Show up.
Show up and keep showing up.
Show up with at least as much enthusiasm as you had when you first raised your hand to volunteer.
The volunteering part is easy. Making promises is a fun way to get someone’s attention.
Keeping those promises is often unsung, but that’s how you build something.’
Although Seth Godin writes this with reference to volunteering, I thought of this piece from another angle.
I looked at this piece to mean the promise we have made to ourselves, when we first raised our hand to ourselves that we will accomplish something special.
Many of us have some plans to achieve something special for ourselves. It could be goals such as getting fit or writing a book or traveling to an exotic location or completing a course.
However, many of us lack execution skills, with the result that these plans never see the light of day. A New Year resolution is a typical example.
As months and sometimes years go by, every time we look at that unfinished business, we suffer from pangs of guilt. Over time, we rationalize this feeling – ‘after all, so many people around us are also going through the same thing and I am not alone in this’. At the beginning, this feeling is quite comforting – to find peace in the company of people who have also failed themselves but then, for how long?
At one point of time, I too used to be caught in this bind. Although my intention to achieve could not be doubted, I would get very little done. As they say, ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ In this process, I also had an impressive collection of excuses to justify my ‘failure’.
However, sometime in 1997, my Manager who became my mentor-for-life, had a long chat with me around my performance appraisal. He pointed out to me that while I was strong in Thought Leadership, I suffered in the Results Leadership area.
He helped me understand something practical, which I created as a quote:
Results prove the intention.
It was from him that I learnt the science and art of working with deadlines, adjusting the speed of execution, estimating the impact of dependencies, escalating things in time, reviewing progress, making course corrections and effectively executing to a plan.
While creating this post, I thought of my recent deliverable of publishing my e-book, ’31 Ways to Reclaim Your Happiness’ that went to my subscribers on April 15th.
Using this example, I have listed down my 10 Commandments of Execution:
1. Visualize in detail what the final deliverable (product or service) would look like.
2. Make sure you assess your skills to deliver the final product or service.
3. List down areas where you may need additional support. These could also be potential risks. The support is needed because you may not have all the skills or because the nature of the deliverable is such that it has dependencies or linkages with others.
4. Assess the impact of the above steps on the timeline. Be realistic on what you can achieve with all the above factors. Double check the time estimation.
5. Set up a robust and objective self-review process.
6. Start with an end date in mind. This is your hard deadline. You just cannot bust this deadline. For best results, make the hard deadline public to people who care about your success. This will create that motivation to deliver.
7. Create a soft deadline. This is your internal deadline that, if busted, sets off your internal alarm bells. When these alarm bells go off, you should have enough time to take action to accelerate progress and/or modify the course. The time gap between the soft deadline and the hard deadline should be enough for you to salvage the project in time, should something go wrong.
8. Set up a visual Project Plan. Make sure you see the Project Plan every single day.
9. Execute as per the Project Plan. Make appropriate course corrections.
10. Celebrate the milestones leading up to the project’s final deliverable, celebrate the contributions of all the people involved. Be generous in giving credit to those who have supported you.
I followed the above 10 Commandments to publish my e-book on time.
What are you thinking? When are you going to give power to those promises you made to yourself?
As Seth Godin writes, keep those promises to build something.
I would add, ‘in building something, you will build yourself’.
My first e-book, ’31 Ways to Reclaim Your Happiness’ was launched on April 15th. This is available free to the subscribers of my newsletter.
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Practical guide well summarised. Keep writing such articles Ramanan. Good wishes always.
Thank you, Raghu!
Regards
Ramanan