The Sunday Mail
Hunt for Greatness
Milton Kamwendo
Intentions are important but they are not a substitute for the lack of alignment. Intentions give you the right to play, but they are not the play. When driving a car, you can feel it when the wheels are not aligned. Your drive is smoother, the car is steady and requires less energy to go faster and further when the wheels are in perfect alignment. You charge towards greatness faster and perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are aligned. Misalignment affects a car’s balance. So it is with any system, once alignment is not in place balance is compromised, energy is wasted and people are seized with doing what is unnecessary and non-value adding. Wherever you see waste, overburdening and inefficiency there is some misalignment somewhere.
Intentions are the first part of the birth process, but they are not the end of life. However, intentions alone will not make greatness happen. You have to make what you dream happen. You have to translate intention into aligned action. You cannot keep threatening that you will take action. You have to fulfil your threats. Align your actions with your intentions. What you think and what you do must be aligned. Winning is an inside job. Intentions are like an arrow; you have to shoot them with a clear line in mind.
The action that you take to translate your vision and strategy into action is called execution. For execution to happen you have to ensure that all the critical elements of your personal or organisational machine are aligned. Execution without alignment causes engine knocks. Without aligned execution frustration sets in. At best you sweat heavily while working hard on a treadmill. Excellence is born when words and actions are aligned, when strategy, ways of working and execution are aligned.
Mind the Gap
Getting off the train in a major British station, you hear the booming voice through the loud speakers: “Mind the gap!” This is the gap between the train and the platform. Whatever you do you never want to get your foot into that gap. So it is with alignment you have to mind the gap.
You do not have the luxury to go through life with your eyes closed, mind wandering and actions misaligned. Mind the alignment gap. This is the gap between what you intend and what you actually do. Misaligned always results in the performance gap. Keep thinking about the internal environment and external realities. Align intentions and actions. The alignment gap cannot be hidden easily or for long. It is always a reality check and call for authenticity.
Action
Talk is cheap if you do not align what you do with where you dream to be. Your actions prophecy your destination. What you do must reflect where you are going. Your actions interpret your intentions. Dreaming and building castles in the air is the first stage of creation. What you need is the courage and the discipline to wake up and start digging the foundations under those castles.
Processes
Align your core processes with the job to be done in order to achieve your vision of greatness. The work you do can be distilled into a set of processes. Keep checking that these processes are working. Address the fault-lines and bottlenecks that clog the alignment of your processes to your vision.
The tough work of execution is ensuring that there is a line of sight between where you are, what you do to move forward and where you intend to go. Identify and remove bottlenecks early. Hiding a bottleneck does not take away the inefficiency bottle.
Skills
In order to achieve your vision keep checking if you have the skills and capabilities that you require. Align your capacity to your core processes. To drive the bus to your destination keep checking who is in your bus, and where the bus is headed. First check your destination and ask if you are in the right bus. Getting onto the wrong bus and hoping that it will get you to where you intend to go is self-deception. Misaligned hope will just frustrate you. Align your choice of buses with your intention. Then ask who is in the bus and where are they seated. Check if you have all the people that you need in the bus and they are doing what they know how to do.
Check if you have the capacity to drive the bus. If you do not capacity, build it. Ensure that you engage capable people to help you drive your bus. Hope is not a substitute for competence; bravado is not brain-power. It is not enough to have your bus; you have to have the skills to drive the bus towards your desired destination. Align skills to strategy.
Buses differ, and they come in different models. Be truthfully honest with yourself and face the brutal realities of alignment. When the bus changes, capacity requirements change. What worked in the past will not always work in the future? The fact that other people are driving their buses may not mean that yours is moving. You cannot drive the bus using presumption. Align your core skills to your vision.
Structure
The structure and set up you adopt must reflect your strategy and not just the conveniences that you have. Once you are clear about your desired direction and end state, you have to take bold actions to align your structure. You cannot be configured in the way you used to play and expect to win a changed game. If you were playing soccer and the game suddenly changes to rugby, you also have to change your structure to reflect the changed realities and rules.
If your structure is not aligned frustration and endless quarrels are likely to be the result. When there is noise in your structure it breeds conflicts, resentment, resistance and wasted energy that is spent in endless meetings, and internal disputes rather that in productive work. Peter Drucker was right when he said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Engaging all your resources to do what should not be done at all is a big waste of time, skills and opportunity. Make real productivity easy and keep this as the goal of work.
Culture
Strategy is your game plan of how you intend to play to win. It is not enough to play just to play. You have to play with the goal of winning. Culture is fundamental rules, spoken and unspoken, that guide the way you play. Change all you want, if you do not change the way you think, you will be frustrated because you will not take off. Change starts with a change in mindset and core behaviour. You cannot change problems that you behave yourself into. You have to align your culture with your vision and strategy. It is hard work, because talking change is easy until you have to change your thinking, mindset and behaviour. Aligning culture is the golden key to translating intentions into action. Culture will eat your strategy for breakfast, lunch and supper. What this means is that all your good strategic intentions do not mean much so long as you are not willing to address how you do things, your core beliefs and mental-frame.
If you aspire for greatness and you do not change your underlying culture you will just find yourself on a big rocking chair – in motion but going nowhere. The war to change culture is tough, rough and the frontier of change. When culture does not change, change is resisted and vision is blurred.
Strategy never goes anywhere without a change in culture. When a positive aligned culture prevails everything is accelerated. When a rotten culture prevails nothing can move forward – at least for long. The cultural core cannot be cheated by tomes of intentions. To change anything start changing and aligning the culture at personal and group level.
Communication
Align your communication internally and externally with your strategy. How you talk reveals where you are going to and who you really are. Communicate your “Why?” With clarity. When people lose sense of why they are doing what they are doing it breeds resentment and resistance. Communicate to build trust and not just to score points. Communicate to provide direction and clarity.
Committed to your greatness.
Milton Kamwendo is a leading international transformational and motivational speaker, author, and growth mentor. He is a cutting-edge strategy, team-building and organisation development facilitator and consultant. His life purpose is to inspire and promote greatness. He can be reached at: [email protected] and Twitter: @MiltonKamwendo or WhatsApp at: 0772422634. His website is: www.miltonkamwendo.com.
