Excellence University Journal

Crossing the Knowing-Doing Gap More Effectively: The “Purposeful Doing Movement”

by Dr. Brian Higley

July 15th, 2006

We at Excellence Tree consider ourselves to be part of what we call the Purposeful Doing Movement.”   This movement is focused on helping individuals and organizations to execute more activities that are truly central to fulfilling their core values and missions – and fewer activities that are not central to doing so. We believe that regardless of our titles within our organizations (CEO, “leader”,  janitor, ect.), the the most important thing at the end of the day is whether or not we are frequently executing activities important to our team’s success an extremely high percentage of the time (80-100% of the time). Why is the Purposeful Doing Movement so important right now? Three major answers come to mind right now:

1. Execution crises: Purposeful doing, at both an organizational level and an individual level, is frequently extremely low. In fact, we have found that most leaders believe that people execute at a high level less than 20-30% of the time! That means that money is consistently being paid to people who are doing something besides their jobs more than half the time – this is a tremendous waste of time and budget (not to mention very taxing to the morale of those who are interested in excellence).  This low level of purposeful doing has been tolerated for quite awhile, but may be even more dangerous to teams in the future for a variety of reasons, including . . .
2. Globalization: Like it or not, most of us who run businesses currently deal with more competition than ever. And it’s only going to get MORE competitive in today’s global marketplace. Execution has been a “nice thing to have” in the past – in the future it may be the difference between companies that thrive and those that flounder in the increasingly global marketplace. The days of allowing those who are not interested in high levels of execution to have great influence over your organization will soon be over, with more consistent success going to organizations with the most Purposeful Doers – in part due to their victories in what may be called the ongoing (and increasingly competitive) “War for Talent.”
3. The “War for Talent”: With globalization comes more opportunities for the most talented (and purposeful) individuals.  These valuable people realize that they can choose to stay with our teams or take their talent elsewhere at almost any time.  Business leaders are truly in a “war” for individuals like these – a war fought against organizations both locally and worldwide. Mechanisms for increasing levels of execution can help teams to both retain the talented people who enjoy being a part of a purposeful team – and to train less talented individuals to execute at extremely high levels (both critical factors to long term organizational excellence).

These three factors (along with a few others) indicate that consistent success is only going to become more challenging in the future. What’s the good news? It’s that Purposeful Doing at an organizational level is quite simple – even if it is not always easy. In fact, we at EU say that this form of organizational excellence is a “piece of CACE” (the Clarity, Alignment, Consensus, and Execution).  To read more about EU’s Organizational CACE Analysis, click here.

Article Filed under: I. WATER (Team/Group Excellence)