ART of execution: Capabilities in your Leadership Team

“Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Strategies fail because they are not executed well. Execution is an ART. Let us take a look at two examples:

• Exotic food recipes are available all over the web; yet to create a perfect meal, you need more than the recipe text and ingredients.
• Most of us can read and write English, yet very few of us can produce a good quality essay or an article.

The above instances highlight the gap between knowing the theory and executing it to perfection. Theory is LOGIC to the most part, whereas execution is an ART. How do we differentiate between LOGIC and ART?

LOGIC is based on definite rules. One can design a process around LOGIC.

ART, on the other hand, does not follow rules; instead it challenges the rules. At best, one may define guidelines for ART.

The idea behind this article is to identify the ways of evaluating the competency in ART amongst the leadership team. Most candidates who are shortlisted for leadership roles have similar capabilities in LOGIC i.e. most will be graduates from a decent university with decent grades. What varies amongst them, however, is the execution or application part of LOGIC, which is ART. This ART sets some apart from others in their past success stories and probable future successes. The ART competency in the leader makes them a business artist.

Do your leaders have an artist in them?

Resumes may not be very helpful in identifying the a business artist, as most of the resumes are exaggerated; that’s human nature. This means gauging the competencies of a candidate on resume alone may prove inefficient.

Identifying and evaluating the artist requires us to go beyond resumes and traditional interviewing processes. Here are some ways through which the ART competency can be gauged:

1. Talk about Hobbies: Hobbies can help us understand the ‘Sincerity of Purpose’. Sincerity of Purpose can be defined as the nature of a person to perform a given job with complete dedication to produce the output, to the best of their capabilities. A simple way of gauging this is to talk about their hobbies and interests. Hobbies are not enforced upon us; they are developed because of our interests and environment. If someone claims to nurture a hobby and does not demonstrate the depth of knowledge in the subject related to the hobby, then you can expect them to be a superficial worker and may lack sincerely of purpose.
2. Reverse interview: Instead of you asking questions, ask the candidates to ask you questions. The quality and nature of questions will help you judge if the candidate asks relevant questions. A smart interviewer can easily gauge the perception skills, depth of the knowledge, typical concerns of the candidate and their thought process during this kind of interview. You can also learn the candidate’s perception about your organization. A good prospect would have done the homework and research before the interview; hence their questions will be more relevant to the role and organization. This might typically work at CXO levels.
3. Describe yourself as a human being: Ask the candidate to tell about themselves in general and not their professional life (professional credentials are already part of resume, repeating the same would only waste time). The candidates will be forced to talk about their inherent nature, capabilities, competencies, skills and weaknesses. This will help you pick candidate with the qualities that are relevant to the job.
4. About role model: The answer to this question may give you insights into the candidate’s fundamentals and thought processes leading to build those fundamentals. We may also get clues on what the candidate is trying to achieve in a long run.
5. Explain concepts to layman: You may ask the candidate to explain the concepts to layman. This will help in gauging the clarity of thoughts and understanding of fundamentals. If someone lacks clarity, they will never successfully execute and only create confusion. Clarity of thoughts is ART, which only best artists possess.

Resumes are getting smarter, bolder and interestingly similar. Segregating the horses from donkeys is tricky, based merely on resume and traditional evaluation parameters. You need to be bold and break the traditions to ensure you get an impeccable executioner on board.

About Tushar Bhatkar

Is part of ‘Arttha — A ‘Digital Mobile Payments and Banking Platform’. I am one of the founding members of ‘Arttha’, who evangelized the platform. I am part of continuous evolution and innovation on Arttha Platform.

You can reach me at tushar@puresoftware.com

Arttha is the product from PureSoftware