The fourth and final part of my leadership experiences in the military will feature Assessment, the last piece of the puzzle in a leadership wheel – Planning, Execution and Assessment – that should always be in motion.

In the planning phase I emphasized that the goals you set should be evaluated, i.e. you have to be able to analyze and assess them. I also discussed the decision making needs that will require relevant information gathering and coordination of activities as well as follow-up during the execution phase. It is important to prepare yourself for decision making, but equally important to evaluate the results of the decisions already made, i.e. did we end up with the results that we had predicted? In the execution phase I talked about reactive decision making, which all managers and management teams should master. Yet again, it’s important that made decisions are followed up, to see the consequences and to feed analysis of the results back to execution.

An organization learns quickly to use assessment as a natural component in its everyday work. In order to avoid a lot of “opinionating” and “shoot from the hip” kind of remarks, the assessment should be connected to planned and completed activities as well as the actual results. Based on these you need to analyze and assess what kind of complementary action need to be taken: modified planning, new decisions, improved coordination, additional information gathering etc. Thus the assessment will be of higher quality and the actions will be traceable. Preferably the suggested actions will be prepared before management meetings, so that all decision makers get to study the background material and the meeting itself can be used to decide on the relevancy of the actions and what time and resources are required to perform them.

I have earlier discussed the importance of so called Key Leaders to improve communication in order to maximize performance and assessment should be used here as well. Since the truth lies in the eye of the beholder, you need to make sure that the message you communicated was the same as the recipients perceived. The assessment can be directed towards various parts of the recipients and be conducted by different individuals. The purpose is to find out if the communication was successful. If it was, continue to the next planned activity but if not, you need to address the issue accordingly.

I hope this overview on Planning, Execution and Assessment from my experiences within the military has given you some new ideas. There are a bunch of other matters to dig deeper into, such as management, processes, leadership, information and Key Leader Engagement but I guess we’ll have to find another time for that…