The stages of creation, planning, definition of strategies are very important in every enterprise, whatever the business sector: industry, service, agribusiness, education and even in the arts in general. But these steps, however elaborate they may be, can have negative results if they are not implemented by execution with excellence. The father of modern business management, Peter Drucker, has a very famous phrase that illustrates this well: “Culture will eat strategy for breakfast.”

What did Peter Drucker mean by that phrase? An audacious strategic plan, with adequate financial resources, well-determined objectives can be an absolute failure, if not compatible with the culture prevailing in the organization.

Strategy is an important part of any business. The problem is that many companies are unable to implement their strategic plans. One of the causes is disengagement and lack of commitment of employees responsible for execution.

So what would be the main characteristics of an execution with excellence to implement a well-designed strategic plan?

The first feature is related to the above mentioned problem. In the dimension of their competence, the executing collaborators must also participate in the process of building the plans and projects. Participation in this process motivates them to commit more to execution. That’s why the company’s culture is directly related to execution with excellence.

The organization must cultivate a culture that stimulates and boosts its human capital, because it is the people who hold the know-how. A culture experienced by values based on the interaction between all involved: leaders, execution teams and suppliers. A culture that values the idea of cooperation and has a very clear purpose for all. A culture more of sharing than control, without underlittlethe importance that control and quantitative evaluation have in the process. For, according to Richard Barret, “power is not in the ability to control, but in the ability to trust.”

The culture of the company that holds these elements and values, mobilizes and drives high performance, through the release of human potential, linking knowledge to practice. And the chance that the strategies will work is much higher, because the employees responsible for the execution, endowed with efficiency and effectiveness, engage and commit themselves to the realization of what was strategically planned.

Engaged and committed, employees will have no difficulty in keeping the focus during all stages of execution. With a focus on executing the programmed strategies, they will not run the risk of putting personal aspirations above the company’s objectives. And they will deliver, in due course, what they have committed to deliver.

The good executioner, after seeing a need, assumes this need as his own, considering himself responsible for it. Driven by the culture of execution with excellence, the employee assumes to always do the best, because he knows that the diligent, those who apply carefully and promptly in the execution of their tasks, will be rewarded.

Because he is committed to significance and excellence, the good executioner always does what has to be done with proficiency and not just what they ask him to do. And he is not always the one who speaks the most, for when he knows how to listen, he chooses to be in the company of the wise.

The good executioner deals with what is constructive, even when he is in the waiting time. Because it makes waiting, growth time, building and learning.

According to psychologist Carol Dweck, author of mindset, people with the ability to perform with excellence are bearers of what she called “growfh mindeset”, permanent learning.

They don’t consider themselves ready, finished. That is, they do not have a frozen mentality, but they are in a process of permanent personal and professional growth. These two dimensions converge in the performers with excellence: they want to learn more and more and are increasingly committed to the values and purposes of organizational culture.

Not only rely on your inborn talent, but with grit, constant exercise and discipline enhance that talent every day. Endowed with the ability to learn to learn, they develop their skills to analyze reality, relate data and information, interpret and anticipate scenarios, incorporating new knowledge. The search for knowledge becomes pleasurable, motivated by the desire to overcome its limits, through the constant exercise of attention, memory and the act of thinking.

But they are not only in theoretical knowledge, because they have also developed the competence of know-how: to apply knowledge with proficiency to solve problems and perform the complex tasks proper to business organizations. And because they have the ability to know how to live together, have the perception of the other, know how to work as a team, manage crises, respect diversities, cooperate in achieving common goals and also contribute to the personal and professional growth of partners.

Employees with the above competencies generally also have autonomy, are endowed with critical sense to give suggestions, correct directions and improve execution, without ever losing sight of the organization’s larger objectives. And most importantly, because they guide their actions by ethical sense, they have self-criticism to perceive their failures, learn from them and, overcoming them, make a qualitative leap in the execution process, always having excellence as their goal.

That is why the process of selecting new employees is of paramount importance within the organization. Its leaders, in all sectors, should seek collaborators who in their profile, present the characteristics mentioned above: capacity for engagement, focus, know how to do what has to be done, work in cooperation with their partners and permanently invest in their personal and professional growth. Companies, in their culture, must create an environment to stimulate the exercise and learning of execution with excellence, in addition to keeping in their staff the employees who have this profile. And value, personally and professionally, these professionals who are overrated in the labor market.

“To lead is not to impose, but to awaken in others the will to do.” This postulate by Márcio Kuhne is appropriate for the conclusion of this text. To him i would add the addendum: do well done, with proficiency and effectiveness. Based on an organizational culture based on the mobilization of the potential of its employees, which stimulates their engagement and commitment, surely is much greater the possibility of execution reaching the level of excellence, realizing the company’s projects and enabling the strategies developed to build the best product, in order to meet the customer’s expectation. Satisfied customer should be the parameter for the measure of the success of a project and even of the organization as a whole. For as Peter Drucker has professed categorically, “the purpose of the company is to create a customer.”