BFG

Emily Myrick

Organizational Execution Leader

Emily Myrick is an Organizational Effectiveness Manager at BFG who helps translate executive strategy into action. Her expertise spans strategic alignment, portfolio management, continuous improvement and organizational performance, with a focus on building accountability and frameworks that support measurable business results.

Turning Organizational Strategy into Measurable Results

In my own experience, I helped establish an enterprise PMO framework that connected corporate strategy with operational accountability and financial performance. I’ve also used Lean Six Sigma and DMAIC to move from identifying a problem to understanding root causes, implementing solutions, and measuring whether those solutions actually delivered results.

Turning strategy into execution starts with clarity around a shared vision, and breaking that vision down into measurable strategies. The strategies must be detailed; I like using the SMART goal framework, so we know what success means.

Organizations need a consistent operating rhythm for reviewing progress, addressing barriers, and making decisions. This is where governance and portfolio management can create significant value. The goal isn’t more bureaucracy, but accountability by creating visibility and helping leaders make informed tradeoffs. The saying is true: ‘if everything is important, nothing is important’.

Aligning People, Processes and Priorities

The first step of alignment is a shared language. If you don’t have a target that everyone is working towards, everyone will be rowing in different directions. Beyond having a shared vision, you need to have a shared framework of how to attack problems. This is where the importance of portfolio management comes into play.

Closing Execution Gaps for Sustainable Performance

Organizations suffer if employees don’t have an extreme sense of ownership over the problems in their business. It starts with having a clear reporting organization and one person ultimately responsible for the business segment results. From there, determining steps for execution then becomes a question of whether the root cause is known or not. If it is known, the team should just go do it if they have the resources and it is important and urgent to the department’s goals. If resources are limited, it may become a lesser priority if it’s not going to solve the goals or strategies the team has committed to in the short term. If the root cause is unknown, then the question becomes if deployment of a DMAIC, Lean Six Sigma project is appropriate.

Future of Organizational Effectiveness

The integration of AI is something that we have to adopt, but with careful planning. If you automate a bad process, you’ll get bad results faster. Diligence to ensure the process is good and you’re prioritizing the optimization of significant bottlenecks will be of utmost importance.

Building Result-driven Organizations

Have a shared vision for the future and make sure that you’re taking steps to get the team to speak the same language in terms of how you attack the problem. The idea isn’t to add more red tape and make it so that solving issues takes longer, but to protect the team against problem-solving whiplash, which can unintentionally make problems worse.