Making the grade

Plans are important because they make you think about your future so you can take full advantage of opportunities and devise steps to overcome any challenges. Whether your plan is for a business, your career, or a family vacation, plans can save time and help you reach your goals faster.

There is a lot of emphasis on planning in the business world, but once the plan is created, there seems to be little time and attention spent implementing or monitoring the plan to ensure it’s accomplished. A 1999 Fortune magazine article suggested that 70 percent of chief executive officer failures are not a result of poor planning, but because of poor execution. Another study estimates that about 90 percent of organizations do not execute their strategy.

I’ve participated in numerous planning sessions and a lot of time is spent going through the process of planning, setting strategic goals, breaking them down into priority initiatives that have specific objectives to be achieved and then creating action steps that identify responsible parties, resources, and timelines. After all the time and energy is spent creating a beautifully detailed document, it typically becomes one of the 90 percent of plans that collects dust on a shelf.

As I’ve thought about this, I also realized that most, if not all, of my students would not follow-through on homework assignments or study for a test if I did not give them a grade. Knowing that a paper or test will be graded is an important motivator for students to put in the extra effort to create a quality product on time, or ensure that they are ready to take a test.

Just think about the time you spent in school. Would you really have studied as much, or put as much effort into a paper or project if you knew it was not going to count toward your final grade?

Grades are universally understood because individuals have received them for 12 years until they graduated from high school, or longer if they went to college. However, after their education is complete, grades fade into the background and are practically never seen again.

When performance is not measured, performance tends to diminish. When performance is measured, it tends to improve, and when performance is measured and reported regularly, the rate of improvement tends to accelerate. The key, then, to improve the performance of a plan is to regularly measure and report the performance of specific action steps. When responsible individuals and teams know they will be required to account for the completion of their action steps, and their performance will be measured and reported, both the quantity and the quality of the number of actions completed will increase.

Let’s take a closer look at that plan that’s collecting dust on the shelf. What if there was some type of grading system used to periodically give the person or group responsible to achieve each action step a letter grade, based on their completion of the step in a timely manner. What if the grades became part of an overall report card for the organization, and the report could easily be reviewed to determine the areas of strength and weakness within the organization. Do you think it might motivate people to take the plan more seriously, especially if incentives were linked to the accomplishment of key objectives?

Periodically review your plan on a monthly or quarterly basis. Prior to the review, have responsible individuals and/or their team give themselves a letter grade from “A” to “F” for each specific action that is to be initiated that quarter and a brief explanation about its status. An “A” means the action was completed on time, “B” signifies it was completed, but not in a timely manner, “C” means the action is almost complete with just minor areas needing attention, “D” indicates the action was started, but has major areas that need to be completed, and an “F” grade means the action was not started or very little has been accomplished. The grade can be improved each quarter, as long as the final deadline has not been reached.

The grades for each action can now be used to determine a grade point average (GPA) for the objective and goals of the plan. Even the plan can have a grade based on the overall GPA. It is now easy to review the grades for each of the steps to determine how the plan received the grade. You can even tie specific individuals or groups to the grades received. This allows you to identify the outstanding performers and those that are having difficulty making the grade. Those with lower grades should receive some extra attention, coaching, or encouragement. This grading system provides a simple method to review the completion level of the plan and easily determine areas for improvement. Without it, your plan collects dust until the next planning session rolls around.

****