Execution Is Slipping? It’s One of Three Things.

Every time execution starts to slip in a business—deadlines are getting missed, or tasks are falling through the cracks, or you've got like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing—it boils down to one of three things. It's going to be priorities, process, or people. And if you don't diagnose it wrong, you end up applying the wrong fix, which then just perpetuates the problem.

And I actually just lived this. We had a big rollout inside my business at MSP Sales Partners, and we had some new tech that was supposed to help our fractional sales managers manage their sales teams better for our customers. And frankly, it didn't go as planned, for transparency. So the first thing I did was pull my team together and I said, "Here's how we're getting this shit back on track. We're going to toss out a lot of the automation and systemization—if that's a word—and shit that we were trying to use to make this more scalable, but it was creating more problems than it was solving."

And I said, "We're going to roll up our sleeves and manually do what needs to get done because all of the AI and automation and tools and tech and shit like that—sometimes, I know it's supposed to make things easier, it's supposed to make things more scalable, but it just complicates shit. Get the thing working first, and then figure out how to optimize it."

So we did that. But after we got it stabilized, I had a real conversation with the team. I said, "Listen, in my career, every time an organization or team starts to slip on execution like this, it comes back to one of these three things, and it matters which one it is."

The first is a priorities problem. You know, either the priority isn't clear, or there are too many of them. Like maybe what's in your head as a leader hasn't been communicated to the team to do the work, right? So it's not clear what's inside your brain for what they need to be doing. Or—this is very common—you've given them too many priorities. Right? They can't execute any single one of them very well because they're spread too thin. And there's a book called The 4 Disciplines of Execution that nails this; they say there's always more good ideas in a business than there is capacity to execute. Right? So too many priorities means the team gets spread thin and you just get lackluster results.

Now, the second is a process problem. Okay, and like the priorities might be clear, and they might even be the right number of priorities, but the way that you're executing on them is broken. In our case, we tried to automate things and make it scalable and make it an easy process for when people get onboarded and this and that. We were doing all that before we got the thing working. And so the team was making assumptions about how this tool integrates with that tool, but nobody actually rolled up their sleeves and just got in there and did it manually five times and documented it to make sure it really works and see how it works and make sure that the systems we're building and trying to automate are actually the right systems. Right? So figure out the manual process first, then automate. But broken processes—they show up everywhere. When you've got tasks that are falling through the cracks, or there's no accountability system, or you've got the wrong KPIs, or things are just not getting tracked—like that comes down to a process problem.

And then third, you know, it could be a people problem. You know, if the priorities are clear, you're not stretched too thin, and the process is pretty solid, then it's people. Right? Like it or not, that's just the reality of it. You can have the right number of priorities and the processes, and if you don't have the right people executing, shit's not going to get done. Right? Wrong person, wrong seat, or just the wrong person. You know, for some people that's a hard thing to face, but it's real in business.

And what we need to do as leaders is take a step back, assume responsibility for the whole thing—it falls to us—and then ask ourselves, "Which of these three is the culprit?" Right? Have I not clarified what the priority is, or have I given the team too many? Is the process that we're using to get this done actually effective, and should I get in there and offer a better way or some suggestions on how we can improve the process in how we are doing this? Or do I just have the wrong people trying to do the job?

Right? And that's what I did with my team. I laid this out, I actually got their input in the room, and then I asked them all to privately submit a one-pager to me with their honest perspective after laying this out and understanding this framework, seeing how I'm seeing it. And I like the data from the team, so I'll go through that and, you know, I'm going to make my own decision and then I'm going to fix it.

And this framework has been incredibly consistent for me across many businesses that I've been in, and I've seen it in most of our customers' businesses and most of the people that I've consulted and some other companies I've worked with. So, if your execution is slipping and you want to get it back on track: priorities, process, or people. Diagnose it right, and then the fix gets a hell of a lot easier from there. Hope it helps. Adios.