Author Archives: Gavriella Schuster

Taking good care of people in your charge is not always easy to do. But it’s imperative for ensuring success as a team. Creating a culture that enables people to do their best is what Microsoft’s three Leadership Principles are all about.

Microsoft’s leadership principles lay the ground for some great leadership principles

Creating clarity

If people aren’t clear about what the goal is, they’ll never reach it. Likewise, if people aren’t clear about what their role is in reaching the goal, they feel confined. Satya once called-out that Microsoft is great at creating clarity on Horizon 2—where we’re headed and what the technology landscape will look like five years from now. But we can improve our illustration of Horizon 1—the path we lay out to get to the North Star.

A great leader paints a clear picture of where they want their organization to go and every person’s role to get there. They lay out the roadmap and milestones—especially in the face of ambiguity—so the whole team is clear on what success looks like. A great leader then continues to communicate and clarify this vision to keep everyone on the right path.

Generating energy

My take on this leadership principle is all about matching people to their passion. I’ve worked on teams where I see people who really excel at something, but not the specific job they’re doing. On my teams, when I spot this, I try to correct it.

Some leaders prefer to build an organizational structure and then put people in the roles. I think that’s kind of backwards. You could be looking forever to find the “perfect” person for a specific role! My approach is to look at the people on your team—and the experience and perspective they bring—then build jobs around their strengths. Capitalizing on the unique abilities of your team members will position them for greater success. This approach inspires creativity, optimism, and growth, and generates energy and enthusiasm around your organization’s goals and mission.

Delivering success

This is critical: results matter. And the results should be visible. How are you providing value to your team, your manager, and the business? People need to be aligned and know the success you’re aiming to deliver.

The unfortunate truth is, we live and work in a what-have-you-done-for-me-today kind of world. Everything you’ve done has helped you get to this point, but what matters most is delivering success today. Ongoing success builds your credibility, your brand, and your network.

As a leader, you deliver success in many ways. You do it by helping others succeed—ensuring your team members are able to work productively toward a goal. You do it by innovating constantly and coming up with new and better ideas. And you do it by relentlessly pursuing solutions to seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Getting off the ground: executing your plan

So, what are the steps necessary to execute on your plan? For me there are four, straight-forward components:

• Get Aligned – Everyone has to be rowing in the same direction. Create clarity by defining a strategy, principles and an execution plan with a clearly defined outcome. What does success look like? Get people excited about the vision and help them buy-in. Always build the execution plan TOGETHER.
• Socialize the Plan – Talk about the strategy with everyone—to the point where you can’t think of someone you haven’t Debate it and collect feedback throughout the process. That’s when good ideas become terrific ideas. Getting input from people who will question the plan’s success, will push the team to do better and keep things on track.  Don’t forget: socialization is iterative – not a one-and-done thing. 
• Create Clear Roles & Responsibilities – How are you going to bring the vision to life? Who’s doing what to get there? One of the keys to proper execution is matching responsibilities to capabilities. Great project managers know their team’s individual skill sets and play to those strengths.
• Check as you Go – Are you on the right path?  Execution requires ongoing project management. When you lay out the roadmap to success, build check-ins and milestones, build in go/no-go checkpoints to measure if you’re on track. 

If the project has taken you on a path different from your execution plan, analyze and be prepared to shift and even to restart if it has gone off track from the objective or something in the business case has significantly shifted.

Avoiding the crash and burn

Many things can derail a good execution plan. In my experience, complexity is the number one cause for crash and burn.

I remember when I was running the licensing team at Microsoft and we were coming up on our first set of renewals. Our first pass at an execution plan revolved around “12 steps to renew.”  TWELVE STEPS! We determined that was way too many and boiled it down to THREE:

• Connect with your customer at least 12 months prior in advance to their renewal.
• Set up a meeting with the partner to create a T-12 customer engagement plan. 
• Prepare the renewal proposal consistent with the customer’s conditions of success plan.

Once we did that, renewals took off. Simplicity is nearly always key. Which makes sense because our brains can really only handle three or four steps at a time.

In order to drive execution, you need a simple motion that is continuous, functional, and repeatable. We tend to over-complicate things. But when you boil things down to a 1-2-3 process, you’ll drive real success.

Delivering results and executing is critical.  As I’ve said before, we work in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of world. Whether you’re working on a small project or a big game-changing idea, stay focused—with clarity and vision—and you will execute your goals.