Execution: Three Good (and practical) Habits to Adopt in Your Startup’s Early Years to Get Anything Done

For founders of 0–3 year old companies, learning both how to think, and when and how to execute are double critical skills that go hand in hand. As the leader of your company, you’re at any one time simultaneously building team, (probably) directing product, and managing operations to support your business strategy and bring your vision to life. Whooosh!

Thus, there’s no better time than in the early years of a company to start putting in place the grounding values that will ultimately shape the culture and guide your company’s growth (and success.) In my own journey, especially as a thinker, I’ve often struggled with the question: “what should I be doing day to day to achieve what we envisioned?”

“As a leader, if the vision is the mine, then execution is the gold.”

In leadership, I have discovered that it’s important to do the right thing, as it is to know what are the right things you should be doing. One of these right things that’s important to get early on, is the discipline of execution.

“Execution not only ensures efficient use of resources in a credit and cash starved world, but also provides the feedback loop needed for the business to adjust to changes — big or small — in the external world.”

Here are practical things you can begin and commit to doing today as you lead your team and business to delivering on the grand vision:

( High-level) when you’re the leader

1. Get good at breaking down the high-level thinking into practical blocks of specific items or things to be done, assigning them to who is responsible, and following up with that person.
2. Ask the right questions, with candid rigor = ( realism). Good questions probe, and bring to light issues that help bring others to the light — (i.e awaken awareness of what needs to be done). There are several question frameworks — one of the basic ones I find great to kickstart anything is: Why? (Watch Simon Sinek’s video — Start With Why, How Great Leaders Inspire Vision)
3. Be engaged — true immersion in your business. A business can execute only if your heart and soul are immersed in the company. If you immerse yourself in something that you are doing, you become completely involved in it.

( Practical ) when you’re part of a team

1. Get good at defining what ‘done’ / ‘complete’ means. E.g, a draft isn’t done, published is done. Often times we stop at the draft stages of things, pick up a new project — rinse, repeat — and then wonder why x months later we’ve been very busy, close to burning out in fact, yet aren’t any closer to what we wanted to achieve.

2. A way of thinking I’ve now adopted and try to stick to religiously is: a thing isn’t done until it’s communicated. E.g Who needs to know? What’re their next steps? And so on. It’s like a game of ping pong until the last block or step is done and you can finally publish/ launch / (insert what done means to you here). This is especially important when you’re working in teams.

3. The art of the follow up — where things go awry and the place where email go to die.

See here ? Here’s the place where emails go to die.

It’s called the land of no follow up.

Basically, an important, non-sexy part of execution (and thus, delivery) is good old follow up. At the basic level, this means — that you set up a date to follow up on the next action items, and then, you *actually* do it. Best way to not drop the ball here is to automate this. E.g, for emails, I use Gmail’s Boomerang. Instead of having messages linger in your mind (and inbox) until then, or just forgetting to follow up, write the message now and schedule it for three weeks out. I especially like the “message received x days ago — reply?” prompt.

So that’s it for now — a few practical ways to get into the habit of execution, which is the life blood of a company & team that’s just starting out.

I would love to hear what your experience has been, or how you have solved this execution thing in your startup, business or with your teams!

(Some of these ideas are based off the book: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.)

Your weekly toast:

“In the voyage of life, may contentment be our fellow passenger. May we be happy, and our enemies know it. Nay our counsels be wise, and our commerce increase, and may we ever experience the blessings of peace.”

Hi there! Here, I share my thoughts, and lessons along the way as I build an internet, media and entertainment company. I talk about effective leadership, productivity, technology, video gaming, digital development and investing in Africa. Posted weekly, every Sunday.

Also, I occasionally curate Ideas, Work and Things that I find interesting for startup founders, investors, mentors, product managers, governments (tech policy) and other ecosystem builders & nurturers in Africa.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +418,678 people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.