Most managers have a preferred way of overseeing employees under their supervision, whether it is management-by-objectives or process management. Sometimes, it’s easy for managers to get too attached to the model that they use, and they forget to examine how employees actually behave each day. It helps managers to understand why goal execution fails sometimes within their team.
Quy Huy, INSEAD Professor of Strategic Management, recently noted in a Forbes article that managers often don’t feel comfortable handling emotions within their teams, especially collective emotions. “However, as much as managers may want their intended strategy to succeed, they still find it difficult to accept that the fate of their best-laid plans depends on the emotional allegiance of these groups.”
Regardless of the effective management strategies that the organization has adopted, somewhere along the way these strategies have failed to produce the desired results. Strategy execution failure is part of managing personnel. Good managers spend time pinpointing instances of strategy failure. They look at root causes, including employee collective emotions, and take corrective actions.
A major cause of strategy failure is when employees have emotions related to a goal and then choose not to carry it out. These instances call for managerial intervention. If managers aren’t addressing employee failures to carry out strategy, they aren’t being as faithful to the top leadership as they might be. This is not to say that sometimes managers overlook employee failures because they’re happy with those individuals’ overall performance.
Get the most from human assets by studying why they fail to implement the firm’s executive strategy, no matter how brilliant it may be.