The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results, Second Edition

Chapter 11. Exploit Key Milestones to Drive Team Performance by Day 45

Milestones are the building blocks of tactical capacity that turn a Burning Imperative into a manageable action plan. Done right, your team's milestone management practice will be a powerful team reinforcer. This is all about follow-through. In brief, drive clarity around:

• Decision rights

• Accountabilities

• Linkages across groups

• Information flows

• Collaboration

  Once this is done, move the focus from the individuals to the team.

Follow Through—Or Don't Even Start

Sam's team put a lot of time and energy into creating a Burning Imperative during a two-day workshop. They left excited and ready to move forward. Then Sam got busy and never put the milestone management process in place. As a result, the team quickly went back to doing things the way they'd been doing them before. If Sam wasn't going to follow through, why should they?

The real test of moving from strategy to tactical capacity lies in the actual practices that are set up among team members. Tactical capacity implies, by definition, that significant leeway should be built into practices. A team that has internalized its imperative, mission, values, and objectives will have developed a keen sense of mutually assured success. Having done this, they will have built a real foundation for true tactical capacity, and will do what it takes to succeed, even if that means ...