For those of you not familiar with sailing, a tell-tale is a simple strip of cloth tied to a mast.
It shows which way the wind is blowing.
A captain steers her ship by the tell-tale, leveraging the prevailing winds, along with her compass to reach its desired destination.
In a successful business, a team leader must also do both: keep their eye on the tell-tale for favorable or unfavorable execution situations, but also set the course with the strategy.
So, even when your strategy has your ship directed in the right direction, you will certainly encounter execution obstacles along your course. These winds are hard to predict, but they can be anticipated and thwarted with executional intelligence and having your team ready to execute at its best.
The story of Uniply stems from the fact that we hear from growing companies about the massive gap between their strategy — their desired destination — and execution. We’ve collectively spent decades leading startups and growing companies, and in that time, we discovered how to keep our ship on course: Using Uniply to center teams around their asset journeys.
At Uniply, our mission is to unify and amplify the best of a team(s), so that their business can can grow and scale with confidence.
We started Uniply to empower you, the innovative leader or CUO, to guide your team’s execution journeys by unifying them in one place and in one language. We call this modern way of working together “The Uniply Way.”
The Uniply Way represents our core beliefs about what makes a team execute at their best. Like a ship’s crew, your team needs to have:
We call these the 4 C’s of a Unified Execution. The best-run teams execute at their best when they drive these core beliefs. And in the rest of this article, we’ll explain each of these C’s and how they are key to a company’s execution capabilities.
It is our bold belief that successful teams have confidence in each other's execution capabilities. From leadership to the teammates — execution requires confidence on both sides for every journey. But where does that trust get reflected and amplified?
That’s where key insights about how teams are executing is critical. You and your team use these insights to elevate your visual representation of your execution journeys, built on a foundation of knowing who owns what. Your team trusts each other to complete their critical asset journeys and move initiatives forward.
Your unified execution mantra is the e pluribus unum of strategy execution — “out of many, one.”
We’ve found that most companies have their execution capabilities living only in their teams’ minds. Sharing them allows you to empower your team in a unified, confident way, and to have confidence in each of their asset’s journeys.
But how exactly should you share them? A unified execution platform allows those capabilities to be harnessed, distributed, and gradually improved to meet and exceed your goals along your journeys.
No crew crosses the ocean by focusing only on the next nautical mile. Whole, cohesive execution is needed for long-term success.
Every leader wishes that they could identify executional challenges as they emerge, but it’s not always possible. By improving their executional intelligence, leaders can ensure that executional hurdles do not become bigger problems.
In other words, leveraging execution data allows team leaders to watch for storm clouds on the horizon, and adjust their ship’s course accordingly.
And, even better, improving your executional intelligence with data allows you to improve executional capabilities, which strengthens your team cohesion after making it through the storm. The next time that the same or a similar challenge resurfaces, it can be easily addressed.
Goals keep a ship’s crew motivated, and united execution journeys is how your crew accomplishes them
In any ship’s crew, collective accountability is crucial! Particularly at growing companies with big growth goals, success revolves around the accountability of every teammate.
If a ship’s barrelman (the one in the crow’s nest) took a nap, then who makes sure the ship avoids an iceberg?
It’s important to lay out your executive level of visibility, i.e., how each teammate impacts each other’s work. This encourages team leaders and teammates to support those that are struggling, and reward the best.
A collective team extracts the best denominator from everyone in that team, versus the minimum task denominator.
Only by working together can your ship cross the ocean
It's imperative that team leaders take everyone’s creative execution ideas into consideration. But keeping up with these ideas can be hard with your own overfilled plate. So, what can you do?
A team leader can take one creative execution idea from a meeting and turn it into an entirely new execution journey. That way, concrete ideas are not forgotten, and the execution is reflected in the asset’s journey for current or future situations.
Imagine your crew shouting their ideas on what improvements are crucial to your ship. You can’t address them all, but you can take the most impactful idea and work together to figure out how to make your ship sail at its best.
The path to creative execution is micro-empowering your team! Watch how they flourish when they see their creative recommendations take form and contribute to key initiatives.
These four core beliefs, Confidence, Cohesion, Collective Accountability, and Creative Execution, are the bold pillars for Uniply. To us, unified execution through journeys is the future of work, micro-empowerment, leadership, adaptability, and more.
Not sure how you can improve your executional intelligence? To get started, you can elevate your team with a unifying execution platform like Uniply. We visualize how your team’s execution paves the way for a successful strategy.
Don’t just rely on your tell-tale or compass — Uniply was built by “unifers” to sail your ship to your destination!
Learn why teams all over the world build their executional intelligence with Uniply: the
Unified Execution Platform