Here's a five-step process for creating organizational (and individual) accountability, which will help to achieve extraordinary results in your organization:

1. Establish the organization's top three objectives. This means the significant few, not the important many. (This is what we at Six Disciplines refer to as Vital Few Objectives- VFOs). Once identified, these vital few objectives must be clear, concise, measurable, obtainable - and assigned to one individual to be responsible for achieving.
2. Assign each of the objectives to a specific team member.
3. Ask each team member what resources he or she needs to win. To help people win, team leaders must remove the barriers or roadblocks that stand in the way. Do this by having each team member identify three things they need to accomplish each objective. Have them put it in writing.
4. Agree on what the team leader will do to help. Have the team leader meet individually with each team member to clarify the barriers and agree on what’s needed to achieve the objective and who will be responsible for making it happen. In all likelihood, the leader will assume some responsibility. Why? Because you’re responsible to people, not for them. Being responsible to people means helping them get what they need to win.
5. Reward the results - not the activity. When objectives are achieved, ensure that recognition and rewards are disproportionate and highly visible. Those who achieve the most get recognized and rewarded the most—and everyone should know that.

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The September  issue of the Six Disciplines Strategy Execution Newsletter (with this month's focus on Strategic Planning) - is now available for viewing. 

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The successful execution of strategy ultimately requires a change in the behavior of employees.

New research conducted over the last two decades has produced a more accurate view of human behavior change resulting from an integration of psychology (the study of the human mind and human behavior) and neuroscience (the study of the anatomy and physiology of the brain).

An article titled “The Neuroscience of Leadership“, from Strategy+Business (free registration required) provides an interesting discussion on organisational change, some of the interesting points raised in the article are:

Some key points from their research:

• Change is painful: Organizational change is unexpectedly difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological discomfort. Trying to change any hardwired habit requires a lot of effort, in the form of attention. This often leads to a feeling that many people find uncomfortable. So they do what they can to avoid change.
• Behaviorism doesn’t work: Change efforts based on incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run. Present the right incentives, and the desired change will naturally occur…… Yet there is plenty of evidence from both clinical research and workplace observation that change efforts based on typical incentives and threats (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.
• Humanism is overrated: In practice, the conventional empathic approach of connection and persuasion doesn’t sufficiently engage people. This phenomenon provides a scientific basis for some of the practices of leadership coaching. Rather than lecturing and providing solutions, effective coaches ask pertinent questions and support their clients in working out solutions on their own…. People can detect the difference between authentic inquiry and an effort to persuade them.
• Focus is power: The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in the brain.
• Expectation shapes reality: People’s preconceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive. How, then, would you go about facilitating change? The impact of mental maps suggests that one way to start is by cultivating moments of insight. Large-scale behavior change requires a large-scale change in mental maps.
• Attention density shapes identity: Repeated, purposeful, and focused attention can lead to long-lasting personal evolution. For insights to be useful, they need to be generated from within, not given to individuals as conclusions.
• Mindful change in practice: Start by leaving problem behaviors in the past; focus on identifying and creating new behaviors. Over time, these may shape the dominant pathways in the brain. This is achieved through a solution-focused questioning approach that facilitates self-insight, rather than through advice-giving.

BOTTOMLINE: "Perhaps you are thinking, “This all sounds too easy. Is the answer to all the challenges of change just to focus people on solutions instead of problems, let them come to their own answers, and keep them focused on their insights?” Apparently, that’s what the brain wants."

The barriers that keep us from achieving the kind of business excellence that lasts are deeply rooted, and can't be removed or solved by "quick fixes".

At Six Disciplines, our research shows there are six fundamental barriers to enduring business excellence:

1. Poorly Understood Strategy. While most organizations have a strategy, most people do not understand it. One research report revelad that 85% of leadership teams spend less than 1 hour a month discussing strategy. The barrier isn't usually the strategy itself -- 90% of strategies fail due to execution. Write the strategy down (3-4 pages max), share it with all team members and give them an opportunity to react and engage.
2. Weak Strategy Execution. One of the major barriers to lasting excellence is how little formal effort organizations put into learning how to execute strategy. The most vital core competence of all is the ability to execute strategy. Understand that there is a big difference between working in the business, and working on the business.
3. Unchecked Organizational Entropy. Small businesses are "systems," and once a small business makes plans, the chaos of everything changing around it gradually erodes those plans. Be aware of change, apply forces to counteract it, make time for planning, set expectations and hold team members accountable.
4. Lack of a Systematic Approach. Thinking holistically about your business - how to make all of the components, people, processes, policies, key measures, assets and strategies work together to meet the promises made to your customers and other stakeholders -- in a repeatable and predicatable fashion -- is key to achieving lasting excellence.
5. Impractical Implementation Methods. Choose wisely when deciding to implement improvement methods and systems, and focus on "goodness of fit" - rather than form, or bells and whistles. Whatever choices you make, they must be practical and take a long-term view -not cumbersome, complex, and a "quick fix" that solves everything at once.
6. People Are Not Engaged. Your employees need to be personally committed to your company's goals - not just compliant. To engage them, connect their work to the purpose of the company. Set appropriate expectations, communicate your strategies, share short and long term thinking, and hire people who are aligned with your mission and values. 

Remember when we could simply distinguish between strategy formulation as "thinking" (analysis, planning, setting goals, etc.) and strategy execution as "doing" (follow-through, top-to-bottom, operational, goal achieving, etc.)?

Today's challenge is how to balance both strategy and execution - or how to build execution into strategy.

How do you build execution into strategy? It starts with a recognition that all parts of your organization - and people at all levels - need to be involved in the process of setting goals, since it's "all people" that are responsible for executing the strategy.  It's a fundamental principle we refer to as "revolutionizing strategy execution".

New research indicates that the "many are smarter than the few" philosophy of management is catching on.

Organizations can unleash the power of collective judgment by engaging broader groups of employees in the strategic planning process; this approach has the added benefit of creating support (getting buy-in) for change, which is required for successful execution.

As the discipline of strategy execution evolves and organizations seek to improve the link between strategy and execution, five major domains stand out as critical for any organization

1. Focus. The focus is about ensuring organizational commitment and alignment to the strategy.
2. Resources. The resources domain involves allocating financial and other resources required to fund strategy and operations, and monitoring those resources continuously to ensure goal achievement.
3. Operations. The operations domain entails analyzing the drivers of business performance and linking operational processes to the execution of strategy.
4. People. The people domain is about ensuring employee readiness and personal goal alignment, and aligning HR processes and systems to support the strategy.
5. Information. The information domain involves developing a technology platform to enable core processes and support the analytic needs of the enterprise.

As baby boomers retire, companies are failing - in a big way - to transfer knowledge to the next generation of workers.

According to a survey conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), only 29% of responding organizations report that they incorporate retirement forecasts into their knowledge transfer practices, and only a third add "skills gap analysis" into those forecasts.

The crux of the problem?

"For all the public gnashing of teeth about the impending retirement of all those knowledgeable, hard-working Baby Boomers, relatively few organizations are doing much about it," says Jay Jamrog, SVP of research at i4cp. "They're going to wind up in a mad bar-the-doors scramble in the near future if they don't start trying to tap the knowledge of their most knowledgeable Boomers."

The solution?

Training remains the most conventional way to transfer knowledge in organizations, with 82% reporting that training is an ongoing knowledge transfer practice. This is especially true in larger companies (those with 5,000 or more employees), where more than 90% employ ongoing training. Another top practice cited was coaching, utilized by 55% of all reporting companies, and mentoring programs are used on an ongoing basis by 44% of organizations.

BOTTOMLINE: For small and midsized businesses to remain competitive, a formalized process of knowledge transfer (of trends, policies, procedures, information gathering, competitive intelligence, and so on...) must be deployed. This process must be open, transparent, collaborative and immediately available (think Twitter, Skype, SharePoint, Slideshare, Posterous, etc.) to share, capture, retain, and disseminate the knowledge.