The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 10

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. Your team's milestone management practice, if done right, will be a powerful team reinforcer. This is all about follow-through. Burning Imperative meetings tend to produce many ideas and choices on flip charts. They are all completely useless unless someone takes action to make them happen. This chapter is about ensuring that they do. In brief, to help ensure that the team delivers the desired results, in the time frame specified, you should strive for absolute 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, ...