Effective motor retail leaders must be skilled implementers of strategy, says Dr William Holden, chairman of Sewells, in his latest installment of an exclusive series with AM-online, where  provides his monthly Executive View sharing insights into people and performance management to help automotive retail leaders to inspire, motivate and guide their dealership teams more effectively.

If strategies are about identifying how you and your team are going to achieve/exceed objectives, implementation is all about actually making it happen. Strategies are ten a penny, even brilliant ones; it’s the follow through.

The implementation of strategies is where the true treasure lies – and it’s usually the biggest gap in any business being successful.

The primary elements of successful companies are:

• Clear goals for everybody within the company that effectively deliver the strategies
• A method of measuring progress, or otherwise, towards achieving those goals on a daily/weekly basis
• Clear responsibility, ownership and accountability for that progress by everyone involved that is driven brilliantly and positively by the managers and leaders

Those are the fundamentals. Beyond that, brilliant strategic execution requires having a systematic way of helping people grasp the current reality and then appropriately acting on it to exceed expectations every time, deliberately and on purpose.

Most companies don’t face their current realities very well.

A key factor in leadership is to persuade people to face reality and then develop the “will” to want to do something positive about it. As Napoleon said, “a leader is one who faces reality … and deals in hope.”

You don’t need to be a business management expert to diagnose whether, or not, a company has a strong tradition of strategic execution and implementation. It’s generally apparent in several ways:

1. Levels of attrition of staff (and customers)
2. Business outcomes being consistently exceeded (or not!)
3. The practices around hiring, on boarding and the day to day type of  performance management
4. The levels of innovation and continuous improvement
5. Reducing costs, increasing productivity and efficiency
6. Retention of top performers (or not!)
7. Increasing levels of the customer experience (or not!)

There are plenty of other tell-tale signs, here’s a useful take-away to try…

Why not ask people, individually, or as a team: “What gets in the way of getting things done properly”?

You may need “brave pills” for this exercise. Then, having actively listened and understood each point, put together a priorities list with a regular “you said, we did”.

Re-visit it every week/month, and watch productivity, team morale and results go through the roof.

Author: Dr William Holden, Sewells