Let's be clear. Ideas are not 💩.
Ideas are important. The great businesses we all know and love (or hate) today began as an idea.
However, great businesses and leaders are not defined by their ability to come up with ideas. They're defined by their ability to execute on them.
Once we come up with a strategy (organized ideas), the biggest challenge we face as leaders is getting people to execute it at a level of excellence.
This is because executing a strategy requires significant change in human behavior. It requires getting people to do things differently.
And if you've ever tried to get other people to change their ways, you know what a challenge that is. Let's be real. Changing ourselves is hard enough!
But the truth is, unless we change our behavior, significant results are always fleeting. What got us here won't get us there.
To achieve goals we have never achieved before, we have to be willing to do things we've never done before. We have to be willing to step out of our comfort zones.
I know, not easy.
The good news is there are rules for executing and breaking through despite the whirlwinds of the daily grind.
The bad news is violating these rules can result in immediate consequences.
Choose wisely.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution
The 4 Disciplines of Execution represent a major breakthrough in how teams and organizations grow.
Warning: Adopting these four principles may profoundly change the way you lead and approach your goals.
Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important
The first discipline is the discipline of focus.
The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.
There's rarely a shortage of ideas. There's mostly a shortage in your capacity (money, talent, attention span) to execute them all.
Focusing on the wildly important requires us to go against our basic wiring as leaders and focus on less so our teams can achieve more.
Instead of trying to significantly improve everything at once, start by selecting one or two wildly important goals (WIGs) to make it clear to your team that these are the one or two things that matter most.
When you narrow the focus of your team to one or two WIGs, your team can easily distinguish between what's a priority and what's "urgent".
Your team moves from a loosely defined collection of objectives to a small, focused set of collective energy and achievable targets.
Discipline #2: Act on Lead Measures
Identifying and acting on the behaviors that have the most impact on your goals is the discipline of leverage.
Your success is based on two measures: lag and lead.
Lag measures are the tracking measurements of your goals. When you receive these measures, the performance that drove them is in the past. There's nothing we can do to change the past. We can only learn from it.
Revenue, profit, market share, and customer satisfaction are all examples of lag measures.
Lead measures are the tracking measurements of the predictive behaviors that drive your goals.
The number of sales calls made, the number of blog posts written, and the number of online form submissions received are all examples of lead measures.
Acting on lead measures is THE SECRET OF EXECUTION.
Lag measures are ultimately the wildly important goals you are trying to achieve, but lead measures are what get you to the lag measures.
Once you identify your lead measures, they become the key leverage points for achieving your goals.
Discipline #3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
Keeping a compelling scoreboard is the discipline of engagement.
People play differently when they are keeping score.
The highest level of performance always comes from people who are emotionally engaged and the highest level of engagement comes when people know if they're winning or losing (the score).
After you've narrowed your focus on one or two wildly important goals and determined what lead measures will keep you on course toward those goals, you need to capture "the game" you want your team to play on a compelling scoreboard.
The scoreboard must be simple enough for team members to determine their score instantly. If not, team members will abandon the game you want them to play in the whirlwind of the daily grind.
When your team doesn't know the score of the game they're playing, they're well on their way to losing.
Game over.
Discipline #4: Create a Cadence of Accountability
This is where execution happens.
Discipline 4 is the discipline of accountability.
Unless we hold ourselves and each other accountable, the goal naturally disintegrates in the whirlwind of the daily grind.
Team members may know the goal, their scores, and what they have to do to achieve the goal, but if they don't hold themselves accountable regularly and frequently, significant results will remain fleeting.
The cadence of accountability is a rhythm of weekly 20 to 30-minute meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.
In these meetings, team members hold each other accountable for producing results despite the whirlwind of the daily grind.
In just a few minutes every week, team members report on whether they met the previous week's commitments, how well they are moving lead and lag measures on the scoreboard, and their commitments for the coming week.
This discipline creates a weekly execution plan that adapts to challenges and opportunities that can never be foreseen in an annual strategic plan.
When teams begin to see the lag measure of a big goal moving as a direct result of their efforts, they will know they're winning.
And nothing drives the morale and engagement of a team more than winning.
In Closing
The 4 Disciplines of Execution work because they are based on principles, not practices.
Practices are situational, subjective, and always evolving.
Principles are timeless and self-evident. They apply everywhere. They are natural laws like gravity. Whether you understand them or even agree with them doesn't matter. They still apply.
Understanding them has never been the problem. The challenge for leaders and entrepreneurs has been finding a way to implement them when the whirlwinds of the daily grind are constantly raging.
This, my friends, is what we signed up for.
As always, stay alert, stay educated, and most of all, stay cool.
Talk soon,
Old Man Winter
