What is the difference between success and failure?
How can you increase your likelihood of success?
How can you have more impact?
The answer is simple in its prescription but challenging in its execution.
In my reading this weekend, I came across some research on the very best CEO's by McKinsey, the global leader in consulting. Here is some helpful data to answer those questions for you.
“Once a CEO sets a direction for the company’s future, the probability of the plan will become reality is low. Many studies, including our own research, conclude that only one in three strategies is successfully implemented. The reasons for failure are rooted in the reality that change is rarely an intellectual problem, it’s an emotional one. The “soft stuff” - issues related to people and culture – account for the vast majority (72 percent) of the barriers to success.”
[...]
“The impact of choosing a “treat the soft stuff as the hard stuff” mindset and taking the actions it calls for is dramatic: The odds of a strategy being successfully executed more than double from 30 to 79 percent, and the impact of that execution is 1.8 times greater. These differences in performance are driven by the best CEOs taking radically different approaches with respect to each of the three sub-elements involved in aligning an organization: culture, organizational design, and talent.”
This means that, as leaders:
our biggest obstacles often aren't merely technical or functional (according to them, 72% of the time)
when we invest in soft skills - our own and those of our teams - the greater the likelihood of success.
This is true in the workplace as well as in your church, family, or sports team. As we say at Relational Advisory Group, competency is not enough.
The good news is that addressing the soft stuff to help our clients more than double their chance of success and see 1.8x more impact is why we exist.