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A simple, repeatable formula for executing your most important priorities |
Although the 4 Disciplines of Execution may seem simple at first glance, they are not simplistic. They will profoundly change the way you approach your goals. Once you adopt them, you will never lead in the same way again, whether you are a project coordinator, lead a small sales team, or run a Fortune 500 company. We believe they represent a major breakthrough in how to move teams and organizations forward.
The 4 Disciplines are sequential and interdependent—they must be done in order and done well to achieve breakthrough results.
Basically, the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. There will always be more good ideas than you and your team have the capacity to execute. That’s why your first challenge is to focus on the wildly important.
Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important requires you to go against your basic wiring as a leader and focus on less so that your team can achieve more. When you implement Discipline 1, you start by selecting one, or at the most, two extremely important goals, instead of trying to significantly improve everything all at once. We call this a Wildly Important Goal (WIG), to make it clear to the team that this is the goal that matters most. Failure to achieve it will make every other accomplishment seem secondary, or possibly even inconsequential.
If you’re currently trying to execute 5, 10, or even 20 important goals, the truth is that your team can’t focus. When you narrow the focus of your team to one or two Wildly Important Goals, the team can easily distinguish between what is truly top priority and what is the “Whirlwind.” They move from a loosely defined and difficult-to-communicate collection of objectives to a small, focused set of targets that are achievable.
Whatever strategy you’re pursuing, your progress and your success will be based on two kinds of measures: lag and lead.
Lag measures are the tracking measurements of the Wildly Important Goal. Revenue, profit, market share, and customer satisfaction are all lag measures, meaning that when you receive them, the performance that drove them is already in the past and cannot be fixed.
Lead measures measure the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal—the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.
A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: it’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members. Consider the simple goal of losing weight. While the lag measure is pounds lost, two lead measures might be a specific limit on calories per day and a specific number of hours of exercise per week. These lead measures are predictive because by performing them, you can predict what the scale (the lag measure) will tell you next week. They are influenceable because both of these new behaviors are within your control.
Acting on the lead measures is one of the little-known secrets of execution. Once you’ve identified your lead measures, they become the key leverage points for achieving your goal.
People play differently when they’re keeping score. However, the truth of this statement is more clearly revealed by a change in emphasis: People play differently when they are keeping score. It’s not about you keeping score for them.
Discipline 3 is the discipline of engagement. In principle, the highest level of performance always comes from people who are emotionally engaged. And, the highest level of engagement comes from knowing the score—that is, if people know whether they are winning or losing. This requires the creation of a simple but compelling scoreboard.
The kind of scoreboard that will drive the highest levels of engagement with your team will be one that is designed solely for, and often by, the players. It must be simple so that members of the team can determine instantly if they are winning or losing. If the scoreboard isn’t clear, the game you want people to play will be abandoned in the Whirlwind of other activities. And if your team doesn’t know whether or not they are winning the game, they are probably on their way to losing.
Discipline 4 is where execution really happens. The first three disciplines set up the game, but until you apply Discipline 4, your team isn’t in the game. It is based on the principle of accountability: that unless we consistently hold each other accountable, the goal naturally disintegrates in the Whirlwind.
The cadence of accountability is a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a Wildly Important Goal. These meetings happen at least weekly and ideally last no more than 20 to 30 minutes. In that brief time, team members hold each other accountable for producing results, despite the Whirlwind.
The magic is in the cadence. Team members must be able to hold each other accountable regularly and rhythmically. Each week, one by one, team members answer a simple question: “What are the one or two most important things I can do in the next week, outside the Whirlwind, that will have the biggest impact on the scoreboard?” Then, members report on whether they met the previous week’s commitments, how well they are moving the lead and lag measures on the scoreboard, and their commitments for the coming week, all in only a few minutes.
The secret to Discipline 4, in addition to the repeated cadence, is that team members create their own commitments. Because they make their own commitments, their ownership of them increases. Team members will always be more committed to their own ideas than they will to orders from above. Making commitments to their team members, rather than solely to the boss, shifts the emphasis from professional to personal. The commitments go beyond their job performance to becoming promises to the team.
Because the team commits to a new set of objectives each week, this discipline creates a just-in-time weekly execution plan that adapts to challenges and opportunities that can never be foreseen in an annual strategic plan. In this way, the plan is adapting as fast as the business is changing. The result? The team can direct enormous energy to the Wildly Important Goal without getting blocked by the shifting Whirlwind of change all around them.
When your team begins to see the lag measure of a big goal moving as a direct result of their efforts, they will know they are winning. And, we have found nothing drives the morale and engagement of a team more than winning.