All leaders have three main areas of focus. Setting strategy and direction, leading efforts to improve the way the organisation operates, and dealing with the day to day operations in their area. Whether you are the CEO dealing with organisational strategy, transformation programs and strategic initiatives, or a team lead looking at your strategy for implementing the next project, improved processes and managing a backlog of user stories, all leaders have these three areas of concern.  

One of the most common problems I see facing leaders today is what I call the Execution Trap - leaders who are trapped in a system that diverts all their attention towards operational matters and leaves them no time or mental capacity to deal with their other areas of responsibility.

How do Leaders get trapped?

Getting trapped in execution is easy. Leaders exist in a world of competing priorities. Leaders are chronically time poor and worse, have to switch contexts constantly, which adds additional mental effort on top of everything they do. Operational matters are often time sensitive and, by the time they have been escalated up to the leader, quite urgent. They tend to grab the leader’s attention over things that are longer term and more strategic in nature. We also have a natural bias towards dealing with operational things - most of us start our careers in operational roles, and we progress in organisations because we are good at them. All this leads to a natural bias in leaders towards a focus on the operational rather than the strategic.

As an example - a CTO I was working with had to step out of an important all-day C-level strategy workshop to deal with a production issue. That CTO had 600 people in their organisation who could have handled that issue without them. There was no need for corporate damage control. There was really no reason for the CTO to be involved at all. As we discussed it, it became clear that throughout their career, they had always dealt with production issues, first as a developer, then as a team lead and a development manager, and so on. They were always at the centre of the response to production issues. So as they grew in seniority, the CTO had built processes to manage issues that continued to put themselves at the centre, with the result that they spent their time looking after production, rather than looking after technical strategy, which, as CTO, was their responsibility. They had trapped themselves in execution.

Trapped by the system

Consider a CEO who told me that his biggest problem was that he had no time to be a CEO, that he spent all his time fighting fires and dealing with escalations. No one would make a decision without his input because a previous CEO had ruled with a culture of fear and ensured that no one would do anything without his approval. Now the current CEO was trapped in execution by the corporate culture.

So leaders can trap themselves in execution, or they can be trapped in execution by the organisation’s culture, which was itself created by other (often long-departed) leaders.

Trapped Organisations

Once a leader is stuck in execution, they trap their whole organisation there as well. When all the leader cares about is the status of projects or managing a few KPI’s, then that’s all the people in the organisation will focus on as well. People take their cues on what’s important from their leaders. They will focus on what you focus on.

Organisations that are trapped in execution tend to perform poorly because they lack good strategic direction. Any strategic direction they have has been pulled together quickly between escalations by people whose focus is elsewhere. They also tend to neglect improvements. They are so focussed on the status of work that they never stop to wonder whether there is a better way. 

I once worked with a large organisation where we followed a small project from end to end to highlight bottlenecks. This project was less than a week's work but took four months to deliver because it sat in a queue waiting for the first team to pick it up and do their few hours work, then it got passed to the next team where it would wait in a queue again, and so on. During those four months there were 16 separate weekly steering committee meetings, where senior people would look at the project and try to escalate the request with the next team to shave off a day or two here or there. The status of that piece of work was studied in minute detail. But at no stage did anyone think to ask, “Why does it take us four months to deliver a week's work? What is it about our processes that makes us so inefficient?” The organisation was so completely focused on the status of work, that it was ignoring the systemic issues that impacted its ability to deliver. It had trapped itself in execution.

Am I trapped?

Take a look at your calendar. How much time do you spend:

• Attending status meetings

• Dealing with escalations

• Making decisions that could have been made elsewhere

• Firefighting issues

Compare this to the amount of time you spend working on:

• Strategy and direction-setting

• Process improvement

• Solving systemic issues

• Developing people and capability

All roles, including the CEO, do need to spend some time on operational matters, and of course the further down the hierarchy you are, the more operational matters will be your focus, but is the amount of time you spend on execution appropriate for your role? Even in a mostly operational role there still needs to be time for things like process improvement. Is the time you spend in each of those areas - strategy, improvement, and operations - appropriate for your role? If it is, great. If not, chances are you are trapped in execution.

How do I break free?

The good news is that while the execution trap is easy to fall into, it's also easy to escape once we realise we are trapped. 

As leaders, we have a choice in any conversation we are in about the type of conversation we are going to have. If you find yourself in a meeting that is all about execution, just asking the right question can elevate it. “What are the systemic issues holding us back?” can elevate a conversation about the status of work to a process improvement conversation. “Is this the right work to be doing?” can elevate a project-approval meeting to a conversation about strategic direction.

If you find yourself trapped in execution, the right question can help you break free. I call these Levelling Questions and we will look at those in more detail next time.

Note - this is an updated and expanded version of an article I wrote for the Cutter Journal a few years ago. You can read the original here - https://www.cutter.com/article/stuck-execution-here’s-how-break-free-lead-advisor