Action Management: One of the most important disciplines you’ve probably never heard of – Part 1.

This is the first in a two part series introducing the discipline of Action Management.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and other works, states that the highest performing businesses have the following three distinguishing traits that get them to the top and keep them there:

•    Disciplined People

•    Disciplined Thought

•    Disciplined Action

Much is written about the first two: how to choose, motivate and keep the best people (whilst leaving the others behind); and the best ways to build strategy.  However, little is written about Disciplined Action for corporates and smaller businesses.

In my own experience, with some 30+ years of operating in different countries and cultures around the world, I noticed that some companies/countries had very strong action oriented discipline (e.g. Japan), whilst others were weaker. Further, there was a direct linkage between the culture and the performance of that company. In the less disciplined environments, despite considerable expenditure on training e.g. in project management, the executive’s day to day activity was heavily focused on exerting pressure to get stuff done. Whilst in the disciplined environments, the executives had more time to address broader and more strategic issues.  

So the simple question is “Is there not a way to systemize the management of Actions, so that the executives could spend more time on Disciplined Thought?”

What you find is that there is tons of stuff about Project Management (the discipline of ensuring you get from a to b on time and within budget) and there is a plethora of information about Transaction Management (making your repetitive processes efficient). These are supported with qualifications such as, the Project Management Professional (PMP) and Six Sigma Black Belts to affirm your knowledge.

While these are all important skills for an organisation to have, they miss the one skill that we all use every day and the closer to the top of the organisation we are, the more of this skill we need.

That skill is Action Management.

Is your Company or Team Action Oriented?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have confidence that when you give someone in your team a task that it will be completed correctly and on time?
• How many times have you had to address the same problem in your team meetings, over and over again, perhaps months later, without it really getting completed?
• Does your team have a well defined list of priority actions that they are all working on in synchronisation?

If any of those questions give you an uncomfortable feeling, you are not alone. Many companies and teams within them, do not have an Action Management system that gives them the confidence, efficiency and timeliness of delivering on their actions.  Without this in place, as Jim Collins notes, these companies and teams within, will not get to the top.