While planning is crucial, it’s easy to neglect the importance of taking decisive action. I often observe mid-level leaders spending significant time strategizing, organizing, and wordsmithing their OKR or KPI documents, ultimately allowing deadlines to lapse through rationalizations. When this pattern persists, progress slows, customers become frustrated, and employee cynicism grows.
Of course, planning is crucial. As the saying goes: “failing to plan is planning to fail.” Planning allows us to think through what we want to accomplish, identify resources needed, anticipate challenges, and map out logical steps to reach our goals. It provides focus, direction, and increases the likelihood of success.
However, planning without action is meaningless. No matter how impeccably crafted the OKR is, it’s meaningless if action is not taken.
I often see this tendency towards excessive planning play out in pre-planned, long, weekly team meetings. The entire focus is on rehashing objectives, moving metrics on charts, and debating timelines. People wordsmith, toggle risk measures between green, yellow and red, and rationalize why deadlines were missed. And then when execution is lagging, the instinct is to respond with more detailed planning—to set even more incremental goals, build more elaborate trackers, and create more stepped targets.
This can become a vicious cycle. The team gets stuck in a rhythm of planning without doing. People feel productive because documents get updated and slides shift color. But at the end of lengthy sessions, no new actions are taken. No one is held accountable to drive execution before the next meeting. The team succumbs to analysis paralysis, unable to move forward amidst infinite planning.
Among the biggest challenges that this creates is the effect on employee morale. The most noticeable is employees become cynical about leadership and the strategy because of the lack of tangible changes. They feel like their time is being wasted planning without results. They start mentally checking out and become disengaged without real execution. And then the organization has a real problem as the culture changes.
How do you fix this? Leaders need to call a timeout on planning and have a bias for action. Start talking about actions as they relate to goals and communicate deadlines to employees. Call timeout when endless wordsmithing occurs. Celebrate small but tangible wins. And shift the culture to value doing not just deliberating. Maybe even consider killing that weekly meeting that people dread.
