Key insights from
The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals
By Sean Covey, Jim Huling, Chris McChesney
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What you’ll learn
We are excellent at holding diffuse ambitions, but what about developing goals and executing those goals successfully? For most, the results are mixed at best. Three experts in the fields of business and leadership identify some of the common blocks to strong execution and provide a framework called 4DX that helps people and organizations improve their track records—while enhancing performance and team chemistry along the way. These strategies are applicable whether you run a small startup or a multinational corporation.
Read on for key insights from The 4 Disciplines of Execution.
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1. The Whirlwind of daily tasks will steal your time and energy unless you separate the important from the urgent.
The Whirlwind. This is the vortex of frantic and fretful to-dos that never ends, sucks us in, and only spits us back out at the end of the day when we’re worn out and wondering why, after so much strain, we didn’t even move the needle in a meaningful way.
The Whirlwind is maximum input yielding minimal output. It is made up of the urgent day-to-day, on-the-job tasks that are necessary but leave no time or energy to attend to the important. Most leaders don’t separate the Whirlwind tasks from strategic goals. Each has its place in the life of any coordinated activity, but without learning to separate them, you won’t see the extent to which they compete for your time, attention, and finances. The Whirlwind is not a fair fighter either, because it gains power from urgency and virtually forces us to comply immediately with its demands—and it usually wins.
But once you discover that there is a distinction to be made, you will begin to see it storm through your workplace on a regular basis. What happens to those new and important goals that start well enough but then, somehow, mysteriously, die? The unanimous response from business leaders is that the demise of these important, strategic goals is never a sudden dramatic explosion, but a quiet, drawn-out disintegration.
Don’t ignore the Whirlwind. If you blow off urgent tasks, it will harm you in the short-term. But don’t let the Whirlwind rule you or your team either—that will harm you in the long-term.
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2. More goals, more problems.
For anyone who wants to execute goals well, there are four disciplines to master.
1. Focus on the Wildly Important
2. Act on Lead Measures
3. Keep a Compelling Scorecard
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability
Together, these four disciplines form 4DX. They are easier said than done, cut against the grain of many basic intuitions, and need to be viewed as a multi course meal rather than a buffet of options, but for those who have implemented this strategy, it has been worth it.
The first discipline is focusing on what’s “wildly important,” and developing a WIG (wildly important goal). If you have 50 priorities, then you have no priorities. If you have 20 goals, you will probably do none of them well. Focus is difficult for many leaders, but it’s necessary for any organization that hopes to successfully execute. Sunlight is too diffuse to start a fire, but a magnifying glass concentrates the sun’s rays, and it’s only then that the fire starts.
Most people who are intelligent and driven recognize this at some level, but the temptation to do more is often irresistible, even when more is less. Unfortunately, there are far more good ideas than there is time and energy to carry those ideas out. You have to settle on a WIG (wildly important goal) or two—but no more than two.
Once you and your team have determined what is most consequential, you have, by extension, determined which goals are ancillary or even unimportant. The more goals you have, the greater potential for the Whirlwind of urgent tasks to gather strength and blow away your time and energy.
If you have just one WIG, it is easier to clarify what is Whirlwind and what’s wildly important.
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3. Spend more time focusing on measures of input than measures of output.
Whatever you determine to be your wildly important goal, there are two ways of assessing progress on the road to achieving it: lead measures and lag measures.
Lead measures are your quantifiable inputs. They measure the actions over which you have direct control. Lag measures are quantifiable outputs. They are also vital indicators of success, but they are outcomes that you cannot directly control.
Let’s use weight loss as an example. If you are hoping to lose weight, your lag measures will be your weight or the clothing sizes you drop over time. Activities like consuming fewer calories, eating cleaner foods, and exercising consistently are your lead measures. They are the new activities that will put you in the best position to achieve your lag measure of shedding pounds. You don’t have direct control over the numbers you see on the scale, but the new behaviors of diet and exercise will give you the best shot of seeing those desired numbers.
Common lag measures in organizations are profit, revenue, market share, subscriptions, and customer reviews. Most of us spend far too much time agonizing and fretting over these lag measures rather than focusing on the directly controllable lead measures that leverage success.
Once you’ve found your wildly important goal, you can design lead measures that will achieve lag measures. These lead measures must clearly relate to and carry you closer to your goal. They must also be designed in such a way that you (or your team) can contribute in measurable ways to its realization. Returning to the weight loss analogy, you couldn’t consider video games or Sudoku puzzles lead measures because they don’t bear on your goal of losing weight in a meaningful way. Good diet and consistent aerobic exercise, on the other hand, do. But it’s also not enough for a lead goal to be highly relevant to the lag goal—it must also something quantifiable, something that you or your team has power to influence. So it’s not enough to say, “I will eat less and exercise more.” Better lead goals would be, “I will exercise three times a week, and consume no more than x number of calories.”
Even highly successful leaders have a difficult time resisting the allure of tracking lag measures and struggle to cultivate the skill of designing and implementing lead measures. At the end of the day, lag measures matter more than lead measures. Eventually, you need the revenue or subscriptions to roll in. But lead yields lag, so lead should be your primary focus.
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4. Teams perform better when they are keeping score.
Shortly after Katrina roared through America’s Gulf states in 2005, there was a local high school football game. It was a significant game and the stands were packed, but the game was different this time: Instead of spirited chants and cheers of celebration, it was a low drone of conversation between fans. No one was paying any attention to the game.
The reason was that there was no scoreboard. Katrina had blown it away. No one knew which down it was, what the score was, or how much time remained on the clock. It completely changed the atmosphere from what should have been an exciting, high-intensity game to a social gathering.
If you see people playing soccer or basketball in a park, you can readily tell whether or not the teams are keeping score. When a game switches from casual to tracking the score, there’s a striking uptick in intensity, focus, and team chemistry. Shots and passes are more accurate, celebrations more jubilant.
What is true on the court is true in the workplace, too. Scorekeeping is orienting. It provides workers a sense of trajectory and shows the payoff of their actions. Most of the time, there’s no scoreboard, and it shows in lackadaisical performances. Decision making and problem solving are sloppy and ineffective.
So what’s the solution? An organization needs a scoreboard for the office. It should be obvious, should track both lead measures and lag measures, and should be simple enough to see whether individuals are “winning.” Most leaders keep complex Excel spreads and analyze them without distilling or sharing progress with the team. This is the common approach, but it’s not enough for the coach to have a scoreboard.
Don’t bring out piles of convoluted charts. When you have a scoreboard that shows concrete contributions that the team and individuals on it are making, as well as the lag measures (revenue, subscriptions, and so on), the team will play better, and, most importantly, they will take ownership of their contributions. They will want to win, now that they know it’s a game and their contributions impact the outcome.
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5. Ongoing execution will fizzle out without weekly accountability meetings.
To review, the first three steps in the 4DX model are committing to a wildly important goal (a WIG), establishing lead and lag measures to begin chipping away at the WIG, and then creating a simple scoreboard for the team to see that will connect their measurable contributions to the wildly important goal. These three disciplines set you up for success in the game, but the fourth and final discipline, establishing a regular rhythm of accountability, is what allows for ongoing wins for the team.
Accountability is vital because no matter how well you start executing your goal, you will not finish well if team members are on different pages, prioritizing different tasks without coordinating with each other. This leaves everyone vulnerable to the Whirlwind.
Discipline 4 is establishing a pattern of weekly WIG meetings. The meetings should only be 20 or 30 minutes. The goals of these meetings are 1) for team members to hold themselves accountable not only to the boss but to one another as they review last week’s commitments, 2) to look at the scoreboard to assess their successes and failures, and 3) to make a plan for the week ahead that will continue to move the needle.
It is vital that these meetings are held at the same time on the same day, and that they go on whether or not the boss is present. Ideally, it becomes an orienting ritual for the team. It can be more frequent than once a week, but never less. In a survey involving hundreds of thousands of employees from around the world, only a third of respondents said that their supervisors met with them once a month. This reveals that there is not a pattern of strong accountability in most organizations.
Once a week is the perfect amount of time: it’s not so long that people lose track of priorities, but not so short that they can’t accomplish something concrete. Moreover, we humans are conditioned to think and organize our lives in terms of weeks. It makes sense to work with the grain of our wiring rather than at odds with it.
Never let the Whirlwind into these WIG meetings. This meeting is reserved for assessing and planning actions that carry the wildly important goal forward. No matter how urgent something seems, save it for after the meeting. Have a separate meeting after the WIG meeting if you must, but preserve the purity of the weekly meeting’s purpose. The Whirlwind will always be looming, but every team needs to put it aside for 20 minutes a week.
This weekly rhythm of accountability will keep you in the game, and it will continue to strengthen your grasp on the first three disciplines.
Change in a person, a team, or an organization is difficult, but when you determine your wildly important goal, use lead measures, keep a simple and interesting scoreboard, and maintain a weekly ritual of accountability, you will notice your team’s powers of execution and chemistry begin to grow.
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