The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

Metadata

• Title: The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals
• Author: Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling
• Book URL: https://amazon.com/dp/B005FLODJ8?tag=malvaonlin-20
• Open in Kindle: kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B005FLODJ8
• Last Updated on: Thursday, June 18, 2015

Highlights & Notes

There are two principal things a leader can influence when it comes to producing results: your strategy (or plan) and your ability to execute that strategy.

One prime suspect behind execution breakdown was clarity of the objective: People simply didn’t understand the goal they were supposed to execute.

In short, people weren’t sure what the goal was, weren’t committed to it, didn’t know what to do about it specifically, and weren’t being held accountable for it.

The real enemy of execution is your day job! We call it the whirlwind. It’s the massive amount of energy that’s necessary just to keep your operation going on a day-to-day basis; and, ironically, it’s also the thing that makes it so hard to execute anything new. The whirlwind robs from you the focus required to move your team forward.

Lead measures are quite different in that they are the measures of the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal. In essence, they measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures, whether those behaviors are as simple as offering a sample to every customer in the bakery or as complex as adhering to standards in jet-engine design. A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members.

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.

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 4 Disciplines work because they are based on principles, not practices. Practices are situational, subjective, and always evolving. Principles are timeless and self-evident, and they apply everywhere. They are natural laws, like gravity. Whether you understand them or even agree with them doesn’t matter—they still apply.

We believe the principles of execution have always been focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability.

We also want you to know that when we talk about narrowing your focus in Discipline 1, we are not talking about narrowing the size and complexity of your whirlwind, although, over time, attention to WIGs might have that effect. Your whirlwind includes all of the urgent activities that are necessary to sustain your business day to day. Focusing on the wildly important means narrowing the number of goals you are attempting to accomplish beyond the day-to-day demands of your whirlwind.

when it comes to setting goals, the law of diminishing returns is as real as the law of gravity.

Steve Jobs of Apple had a big company to run, and he could have proudly brought many more products to market than he did; but he chose to focus on a handful of “wildly important” products. His focus was legendary.

“Improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively … the more you multitask  … the less deliberative you become; the less you’re able to think and reason out a problem,”

To succeed, you must be willing to make the hard choices that separate what is wildly important from all the many other merely important goals on your radar.

The problem is that creative, ambitious people always want to do more, not less.

However, the greatest challenge you face in narrowing your goals is simply that it requires you to say no to a lot of good ideas. 4DX may even mean saying no to some great ideas, at least for now. Nothing is more counterintuitive for a leader than saying no to a good idea, and nothing is a bigger destroyer of focus than always saying yes.

“We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. The table each of you is sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenue last year was $40 billion.

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, unapologetically—to say no to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”

Unless you can achieve your goal with a stroke of the pen, success is going to require your team to change their behavior; and they simply cannot change that many behaviors at once, no matter how badly you want them to.

So, beyond avoiding these two focus traps—refusing to say no to all the good ideas and trying to make everything in the whirlwind a goal—what should you do? Narrow your focus to one or two wildly important goals and consistently invest the team’s time and energy into them. In other words, if you want high-focus, high-performance team members, they must have something wildly important to focus on.

A wildly important goal (WIG) is a goal that can make all the difference. Because it’s your strategic tipping point, you’re going to commit to apply a disproportionate amount of energy to it—the 20 percent that is not used up in the whirlwind.

In determining your wildly important goal, don’t ask “What’s most important?” Instead, begin by asking “If every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?”

• aha!

Your wildly important goal will come from one of two categories: either from within the whirlwind or from outside it. Within the whirlwind, it could be something so badly broken that it must be fixed, or it could be a key element of your value proposition that isn’t being delivered. Poor project completion time, out-of-control costs, or unsatisfactory customer service are all good examples. However, it could also be an area in which your team is already performing well and where leveraging this strength could result in significant impact.

Outside the whirlwind, the choices tend to be about repositioning yourself strategically. Launching a new product or service, either to counter a competitive threat or seize a huge opportunity, could be a WIG that would make all the difference. Remember that this type of WIG will require an even greater change in behavior, since it will be completely new to your team.

Whether your WIG comes from within the whirlwind or outside it, your real aim is not only to achieve it, but also to then make the new level of performance a natural part of your team’s operation. In essence, once a WIG is achieved, it goes back into the whirlwind.

Rule #1: No team focuses on more than two WIGs at the same time.

Rule #2: The battles you choose must win the war.

The only reason you fight a battle is to win the war. The sole purpose of WIGs at lower levels in the organization is to help achieve the WIGs at higher levels. It isn’t enough that the lower-level WIGs support or align with the higher WIGs. The lower-level WIGs must ensure the success of the higher WIGs.

Once the top-level WIG is chosen, the next question is critical. Instead of asking, “What are all the things we could do to win this war?”—a common mistake that results in a long to-do list—ask, “What are the fewest number of battles necessary to win this war?” The answer to that question determines which and how many lower-level WIGs will be needed to achieve the top-level WIG. As you begin to choose the battles to win the war, you have begun to both clarify and simplify your strategy.

Rule #3: Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate.

While the senior leaders will undoubtedly determine the top-level WIG, they must allow the leaders at each level below to define the WIGs for their teams.

Through this process, the senior leader’s choice of the overall WIG brings clarity (top down), and allowing the leaders and teams below to choose their WIGs (bottom up) brings engagement.

Rule #4: All WIGs must have a finish line in the form of from X to Y by when.

Effective lag measures look like this: • “Improve inventory processing by increasing per-year inventory turns from eight to ten by December 31.” • “Raise our client-relationship score from forty to seventy on the loyalty scale within two years.” • “Move 40 percent of our customers from fixed categories to life-cycle categories of investments within five years.” • “Launch the new CRM solution at an 85 percent quality beta rating by the end of our fiscal year.”

In setting a finish line, we often hear the question, “Over what period of time should the achievement of a WIG be spread?” Our answer is, “It depends.” Since teams and organizations often think and measure themselves in terms of a calendar or a fiscal year, a one-year time frame makes a good starting point for a WIG. That said, remember that a WIG is not a strategy. A WIG is a tactical goal with a limited time frame. We’ve seen some WIGs that take two years and some that take six months. The length of a project-based WIG, such as “Complete the new website within budget by July 1,” will usually correspond with the time frame of the project itself. Use your own judgment. Just remember that a WIG should be within a time frame that balances the need to create a compelling vision with the need to create an achievable goal.

Now, consider a different question: When accountability soared, what happened to morale and engagement? It, too, went through the roof. Most leaders find this surprising. We tend to think that when accountability is at its highest, the pressure makes morale go down. The reality is the opposite: Narrowing your focus increases both accountability and the engagement of your team.

This is why Discipline 1 requires you to translate your strategy from concepts to targets, from a vague strategic intent to a set of specific finish lines.

As Steve Jobs often said, “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we

The second discipline is to apply disproportionate energy to the activities that drive your lead measures. This provides the leverage for achieving the lag measures. Discipline 2 is the discipline of leverage. Lead measures are the “measures” of the activities most connected to achieving the goal.

Discipline 1 takes the wildly important goal for an organization and breaks it down into a set of specific, measurable targets until every team has a wildly important goal that it can own. Discipline 2 then defines the leveraged actions that will enable the team to achieve that goal.

While a lag measure tells you if you’ve achieved the goal, a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal. While a lag measure is hard to do anything about, a lead measure is virtually within your control.

Discipline 2 requires you to define the daily or weekly measures, the achievement of which will lead to the goal. Then, each day or week, your team identifies the most important actions that will drive those lead measures. In this way, your team is creating a just-in-time plan that enables them to quickly adapt, while remaining focused on the WIG.

First, a lead measure is predictive, meaning that if the lead measure changes, you can predict that the lag measure also will change. Second, a lead measure is influenceable; it can be directly influenced by the team. That is, the team can make a lead measure happen without a significant dependence on another team.

There are two reasons almost all leaders do this. First, lag measures are the measures of success; they are the results you have to achieve. Second, data on lag measures is almost always much easier to obtain and more visible than data on lead measures. It’s easy to step on a scale and know exactly how much you weigh, but how easy is it to find out how many calories you’ve eaten today or how many you’ve burned? That data is often hard to get, and it can take real discipline to keep getting it.

In the end, it’s the data on lead measures that makes the difference, that enables you to close the gap between what you know your team should do and what they are actually doing.

The key principle behind lead measures is simply this: leverage. Think of it this way: achieving your wildly important goal is like trying to move a giant rock; but despite all the energy your team exerts, it doesn’t move. It’s not a question of effort; if it were, you and your team would already have moved it. The problem is that effort alone isn’t enough. Lead measures act like a lever, making it possible to move that rock.

Now consider the two primary characteristics of a lever. First, unlike the rock, the lever is something we can move: It’s influenceable. Second, when the lever moves, the rock moves: It’s predictive.

To achieve a goal you’ve never achieved before, you must do things you’ve never done before.

We have learned that the lead measures are usually already there in the business, but no one is tracking them. Management was swimming in data, but not focusing on the data that would really make a difference. The key is to isolate and consistently track the right levers.

That’s how statisticians and computer scientists got into the picture. Their hard research began to serve up factors that had always been there but that no one had ever noticed before. They discovered that the mighty sluggers who hit home runs were often not all that productive. The most productive players were the ones who could just get on base. If they could get to one base and then another and then another, they could score runs much more reliably than the power hitters everyone valued so much, and who commanded astronomical salaries. As in the old fable, the tortoises turned out to provide much more leverage than the hares.

What Billy Beane did was to track the on-base record of players across the league and then recruit from those who were very good at getting on base. These players were usually not flashy, not the big-name athletes, and didn’t pull down big money. But they were dependable workhorses who could be relied on to get on base. Getting on base was the best predictor of producing runs. And, in baseball, runs are the name of the game.

The lesson in this story is that lead measure data is almost always more difficult to acquire than lag measure data, but you must pay the price to track your lead measures.

measures called a preflight checklist.15 After that, there were far fewer crashes due to pilot error. Today, the preflight checklist is the greatest predictor of arriving safely. The preflight checklist is a perfect example of what we mean by a high-leverage activity. Going through the checklist takes a few minutes but can have enormous impact. One hundred percent compliance with the checklist is also an excellent example of a lead measure: It is predictive of a safe landing and influenceable by the pilots.

When a team defines its lead measures they are making a strategic bet. In a sense, they are saying, “We’re betting that by driving these lead measures we are going to achieve our wildly important goal.” They believe that the lever is going to move the rock, and because of that belief, they engage.

Coming up with the right lead measures is really about helping everyone see themselves as strategic business partners and engaging them in dialogue about what can be done better or differently in order to achieve the WIGs.

In practice, the plan broke down into simple lead measures: in the weekly WIG sessions people committed to hit a certain number of new-customer contacts, reactivation calls, and upsell offers. The next week they reported the results. Individual salespeople were not only managing their own business more effectively, but also regularly communicating to each other best practices, refinements to approaches, and ways of overcoming barriers.

The third discipline is to make sure everyone knows the score at all times, so that they can tell whether or not they are winning. This is the discipline of engagement.

“The fundamental purpose of a players’ scoreboard is to motivate the players to win.”

shift. If your team is geographically dispersed, the scoreboard should be visible on your desktop computer or mobile phone

Winning or losing requires you to know two things: where you are now and where you should be now.

here.

“People are most satisfied with their jobs (and therefore most motivated) when those jobs give them the opportunity to experience achievement.”

A winning team doesn’t need artificial morale boosting. All the psyching up and rah-rah exercises companies do to raise morale aren’t nearly as effective in engaging people as the satisfaction that comes from executing with excellence a goal that really matters.

The fourth discipline is to create a cadence of accountability, a frequently recurring cycle of accounting for past performance and planning to move the score forward.

in a 4DX organization, accountability means making personal commitments to the entire team to move the scores forward and then following through in a disciplined way.

The focus of the WIG session is simple: to hold each other accountable for taking the actions that will move the lead measures, resulting in the achievement of the WIG despite the whirlwind.

Second, the whirlwind is never allowed into a WIG session. No matter how urgent an issue may seem, discussion in the WIG session is limited solely to actions and results that move the scoreboard. If you need to discuss other things, hold a staff meeting after the WIG session, but keep the WIG session separate.

They hold a WIG session for twenty to thirty minutes and then hold a staff meeting right after, during which they can discuss whirlwind issues.

scoreboard.

To prepare for the meeting, every team member thinks about the same question: “What are the one or two most important things I can do this week to impact the lead measures?”

As discussed above, this focus on impacting the lead measures each week is critical because the lead measures are the team’s leverage for achieving the WIG. The commitments represent the things that must happen, beyond the day to day, to move the lead measures. This is why so much emphasis is placed in Discipline 2 on ensuring that the lead measures are influenceable: so that the team can actually move them through their performance each week. Simply put, the keeping of weekly commitments drives the lead measures, and the lead measures drive achievement of the WIG.

Realize that these weekly commitments are often not urgent or necessarily even new. They often are things the team should be doing naturally, but the reality is that these are the actions the whirlwind devours first. Without the steady rhythm of accountability of Discipline 4, there will always be things the team members know they should do, but never actually do with real consistency.

“Goals cannot sound noble but vague. Targets cannot be so blurry they can’t be hit. Your direction has to be so vivid that if you randomly woke one of your employees in the middle of the night and asked him, ‘Where are we going?’ he could still answer in a half-asleep

If the lead measures are influenceable, they can be moved by the weekly commitments. If they are predictive, then moving them will lead to achievement of the WIG.

While the leader of the WIG session is responsible for ensuring the quality of commitments, it’s critical that the commitments come from the participants.

Parkinson’s Law states: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,”

In his book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Patrick Lencioni describes brilliantly three reasons individuals disengage from work. 1. Anonymity: They feel their leaders don’t know or care what they are doing. 2. Irrelevance: They don’t understand how their job makes a difference. 3. Immeasurement: They cannot measure or assess for themselves the contribution they are making.

Our on-line system used for running WIG sessions, my4dx.com (explained beginning on page 194) has captured millions of commitments from teams all over the world.

In the end, people will work hard to avoid disappointing their boss, but they will do almost anything to avoid disappointing their teammates.

goals.

However, in Discipline 4, the team plans weekly against their lead measures, in essence, creating a just-in-time plan based on commitments that they could not have imagined at the beginning of the month, let alone the beginning of the year. The constant weekly energy applied against the lead measures creates a unique form of accountability that connects the team directly to the goal, again and again.

• Discipline 1: Careful focus on a clear lag measure: losing a certain amount of weight within a certain time frame—from X to Y by when. • Discipline 2: Acting on the high-leverage lead measures of calorie intake and output through exercise, measures that the participants can control. These lead mea- sures are expressed in terms of points that are easily tracked. • Discipline 3: Regular scorekeeping and monitoring of the lead measures and the lag measure. A compelling scoreboard engages people and keeps them on track toward the goal. • Discipline 4: The cadence of accountability: the weekly meeting with others who have the same goal. They share stories, check the scoreboard (the scale), celebrate successes, and talk about lapses and what to do about them. Many participants say that the weekly weigh-in is the most motivating thing about the program.

The launch phase of 4DX is not guaranteed to go smoothly. You will have your models (those who get on board), your potentials (those who struggle at first), and your resisters (those who don’t want to get on board). Here are some keys to a successful launch: • Recognize that a launch phase requires focus and energy—especially from the leader. • Remain focused and implement the 4DX process diligently. You can trust the process. • Identify your models, potentials, and resisters (more on these groups below).

Recognize that adoption of the new 4DX process will take time. Adherence to the process is essential to your success on the WIG: be respectful but diligent about sticking with the process. Otherwise, the whirlwind will quickly take over. Remember these keys to successful adoption of 4DX: • Focus first on adherence to the process, then on results. • Make commitments and hold each other accountable in weekly WIG sessions. • Track results each week on a visible scoreboard. • Make adjustments as needed. • Invest in the potentials through additional training and mentoring. • Answer straightforwardly any issues with resisters and clear the path for them if needed.

If you’re consistent about 4DX, you can expect team members to begin optimizing it on their own. Here are keys to making the most of this stage: • Encourage and recognize abundant creative ideas for moving the lead measures, even if some work better than others. • Recognize excellent follow-through and celebrate successes. • Encourage team members to clear the path for each other and celebrate it when it happens. • Recognize when the potentials start performing like the models.

Here are keys to help the team make 4DX habitual: Scan the image above to see a series of video case studies on 4DX in health care. • Celebrate the accomplishment of the WIG. • Move immediately on to new WIGs in order to formalize 4DX as your operating system. • Emphasize that your new operating standard is sustained superior performance on lead measures. • Help individual team members become high performers by tracking and moving the middle.

Many teams have multiple goals—sometimes dozens, all of which are priority one. Of course, that means that nothing is priority one.

Top Down and Bottom Up: Ideally, both the leader and the team participate in defining the WIGs. Only the leader can provide clarity about what matters most. The leader is ultimately responsible for the WIG, but shouldn’t engage team members solely through the exercise of authority. To reach the goal and to transform the team, team members must have active input in defining the WIG: “No involvement, no commitment.”

Discovery Questions We’ve found these three questions useful in discovering the WIG. • “Which one area of our team’s performance would we want to improve most (assuming everything else holds) in order to achieve the overall WIG of the organization?” (This question is more useful than “What’s the most important thing we can do?”) • “What are the greatest strengths of the team that can be leveraged to ensure the overall WIG is achieved?” (This question will generate ideas in areas in which your team is already succeeding, but where they can also take their performance to an even higher level.) • “What are the areas where the team’s poor performance most needs to be improved to ensure the overall WIG is achieved?” (This question will generate ideas around performance gaps that, if not improved, actually represent a threat to achieving the overall WIG.)

Avoid the trap of selecting WIGs that improve the team’s performance but might have little to do with achieving the overall WIG.

Once you’ve identified a couple of high-impact WIG candidates, test them against four specific criteria for a wildly important goal: • Is the Team WIG aligned to the overall WIG? • Is it measurable? • Who owns the results—our team or some other team? • Who owns the game—the team or the leader?

keeping score, you’re just practicing.” A game without a clearly measurable score will never be a game that matters. A WIG requires that a credible measurement be in place from the day you begin executing. If significant effort is required before you begin measuring, as with the performance of a system that hasn’t been developed yet, it should be crossed off for now. Once the system is running, reconsider it, but time invested in a game without a score is time lost

Of course, if two teams own the same WIG, joint ownership can be a powerful driver of performance, so long as both teams, and both leaders, understand that they win or lose together.

Once you’ve selected and tested your ideas for high-impact team WIGs, make them as clear and measurable as possible. Define the WIGs according to the following rules: • Begin with a verb. • Define the lag measure in terms of X to Y by When. • Keep it simple. • Focus on what, not how.

Set a goal that challenges the team to rise to their highest level of performance but not beyond it. In other words, create a WIG that is both worthy and winnable.

relates to the business outcome the project is designed to meet. As legendary Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”25 So, instead of defining your lag measure solely as “Complete and implement the new CRM system by Dec 31,” you might establish a more precise lag measure by adding measures such as the following: • Meeting 100 percent of the specified marketing functions • Providing full integration with Microsoft Outlook • Including full functionality for smartphones and tablet PCs

WIG Builder Tool 1. Brainstorm ideas for the WIG. 2. Brainstorm lag measures for each idea (from X to Y by when). 3. Rank in order of importance to the organization or to the overall WIG 4. Test your ideas against the checklist on the facing page. 5.

Great teams invest their best efforts in those few activities that have the most impact on the WIGs: the lead measures. This insight is so crucial and so distinctive, yet so little understood that we call it the secret of excellence in execution.

Acting on lead measures is essential to superb performance, but it is also the single most difficult aspect of installing 4DX in your team. There are three reasons for this: • Lead measures can be counterintuitive. Most leaders focus on lag measures, the bottom line results that ultimately matter. This focus is only natural. But you cannot act on a lag measure because it’s in the past. • Lead measures are hard to keep track of. They are measures of new and different behaviors, and tracking behaviors is much harder than tracking results. Often, there is no readily available system for tracking lead measures, so you might have to invent such a system. • Lead measures often look too simple. They demand a precise focus on a certain behavior that might look insignificant (although it isn’t), particularly to those outside the team.

Often, lead measures simply close the gap between knowing what to do and doing it. Just as a simple lever can move a big rock, a good lead measure provides powerful leverage.

Small outcomes are lead measures that focus the team on achieving a weekly result, but give each member of the team latitude to choose their own method for achieving it. “Limit out of stocks to twenty or fewer per week” is a small-outcome lead measure where a variety of actions could be applied. Whatever actions they choose, with a small-outcome lead measure the team is ultimately accountable for producing the result. Leveraged behaviors are lead measures that track the specific behaviors you want the team to perform throughout the week. They enable the entire team to adopt new behaviors at the same level of consistency and quality, and provide a clear measurement of how well they are performed. With a leveraged behavior lead measure, the team is accountable for performing the behavior, rather than for producing the result.

We’ve found these questions useful in discovering the lead measures: • “What could we do that we’ve never done before that might make all the difference to the WIG?” • “What strengths of this team can we use as leverage on the WIG? Where are our ‘pockets of excellence’? What do our best performers do differently?” • “What weaknesses might keep us from achieving the WIG? What could we do more consistently?”

Step 3: Test Top Ideas Once you’ve identified a couple of high-leverage lead measures, test them against these six criteria: • Is it predictive? • Is it influenceable? • Is it an ongoing process or a “once and done”? • Is it a leader’s game or a team game? • Can it be measured? • Is it worth measuring?

Remember, the ideal lead measure is an action that moves the lag measure and that the team can readily take without a significant dependence on another team.

ARE WE TRACKING TEAM OR INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE?

ARE WE TRACKING THE LEAD MEASURE DAILY OR WEEKLY?

WHAT IS THE QUANTITATIVE STANDARD? In other words, “How much / how often / how consistently are we supposed to perform?” At Younger Brothers, the lead measure was 97 percent compliance with six safety standards. How did they arrive at 97 percent? How would you? You decide based on the urgency and importance of the WIG. Remember that the lever has to move a lot to move the rock a little. If safety compliance is only 67 percent, going for 97 percent will move the rock a lot—and

If you’ll be measuring an activity your team already does, it’s essential that the level of performance go up significantly beyond where it is today. Otherwise, you’ll be playing out a familiar definition of insanity: Doing the same things you’ve always done, but expecting different results.

WHAT IS THE QUALITATIVE STANDARD? In other words, “How well are we supposed to perform?” Not all lead measures have to answer this question. Still, the most impactful lead measures set the standard not only for how often or how many, but also how well the team must perform.

Improve customer loyalty score from 40 to 70 within two years Achieve 99% server availability each week

Processes always present the same challenges: Is the process getting us results? Are we even following the process? Do we have the right process? Somewhere in every process there are leverage points, critical steps in the process where performance falters. If these leverage points become lead measures, the team can apply concentrated energy against them.

CAN PROJECT MILESTONES BE GOOD LEAD MEASURES? If your WIG is a single project, your project milestones may be effective lead measures, but you’ll need to evaluate them carefully. If the milestones are both predictive of project success (for a description of project lag measures, see page 131) and influenceable by the team, they can be good candidates. However, they must also be significant enough for weekly commitments to be made against them. The smaller or more granular the milestones are, the less opportunity for weekly commitments. A milestone that requires less than six weeks to complete is generally not significant enough to serve as a good lead measure. Alternatively, if your WIG consists of multiple projects, your lead measures are more likely to be procedures that you are using to ensure success in all projects, such as the completion of formal scoping, functional requirements definition, project communication, or testing procedures. In this case, you should choose the most predictive and influenceable components of your project process as lead measures.

Top performers are thus more than twice as likely to see and interact with some form of compelling scoreboard so they can see if they are winning or not.

People give less than their best and finest effort if no one is keeping score—it’s just human nature.

If the scoreboard doesn’t motivate energetic action, it is not compelling enough to the players. All team members should be able to see it and watch it change moment by moment, day by day, or week by week. They should be discussing it all the time. They should never really take their minds off it.

Post the scoreboard where the team will see it often. The more visible the scoreboard, the more the team will stay connected to the game. If you want to motivate the team even more, post it where other teams can see it as well. If your team is dispersed geographically, the scoreboard should be visible remotely

Include both the WIG lag measure and the lead measures.

Design the scoreboard so that in five seconds or less the team can determine whether they are winning or losing. This is the true test of a players’ scoreboard.

Let the team build the scoreboard. The greater their involvement, the better—they will take more ownership of it if they build it themselves.

• @sergeiw @bawaro

If the scoreboard is hard to update, you’ll be tempted to put it off when the whirlwind strikes—and your wildly important goal will disappear in the noise and confusion. The leader should make very clear: • Who is responsible for the scoreboard. • When it will be posted. • How often it will be updated.

With other possible WIGs, such as increased customer satisfaction or improved quality, there might not be a predetermined way to measure progression. In such cases, draw the target line subjectively based on your expectations and knowledge of the team’s performance.

To ensure the credibility of the scoreboard, the leader periodically audits the performance of the team to validate that the scores being recorded match the level of performance observed. The rule here is trust, but verify.

It’s the sense of winning that drives engagement, and nothing drives results more than a team that is fully engaged—you’ll see that every time you update the scoreboard.

What gets measured does get done—but

to refocus the team on the WIG despite the daily whirlwind. It takes place regularly, at least weekly, and sometimes more often. It has a fixed agenda, as illustrated in the model below:

1. Account: Report on last week’s commitments. Each team member reports on the commitments to move the lead measures that he or she made the prior week. 2. Review the scoreboard: Learn from successes and failures. The team assesses whether their commitments are moving the lead measure and whether the lead measure is moving the lag measure. They discuss what they’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t and how to adapt. 3. Plan: Clear the path and make new commitments. Based on this assessment, each member of the team makes commitments for the coming week that will raise the lead measures to the required level of performance. Because team members create the commitments themselves, and because they are publicly accountable for them to each other, they go away determined to follow through—it becomes personally important.

single team commitment to raise their performance. 3.

The effectiveness of the WIG session depends on the consistency of the cadence, but the results on the scoreboard depend on the impact of the commitments. You’ll need to guide the team in making commitments that have the highest possible impact.

“What are the one or two most important things I can do this week to impact the team’s performance on the scoreboard?”

This is most critical: every commitment must be directed at moving the lead and lag measures on your scoreboard.

Team members are more likely to take ownership of commitments they come up with themselves. Still, the leader should make sure the commitments meet the following standards: • Specific. The more specific the commitment, the higher the accountability for it. You can’t hold people accountable for vague commitments. Commit to exactly what you will do, when you will do it, and what you expect the outcome will be. • Aligned to moving the scoreboard. Make sure the commitments move the scoreboard; otherwise, you’re just committing more energy to the whirlwind. For instance, the week before your annual budget is due you might be tempted to make a commitment to complete the budget because it’s both urgent and important. However, if the budget has little to do with the lead measures, it won’t affect the WIG no matter how urgent it seems. • Timely. High impact commitments must be completed within the coming week, but they should also impact the team’s performance in the near term. If the real impact of your commitment is too far in the future, it won’t help to build the weekly rhythm of winning.

Competing whirlwind responsibilities. This is the most common challenge you and your team will face when you begin applying Discipline 4. Don’t mistake whirlwind urgencies for WIG commitments. An effective question for testing a commitment is “How will fulfilling this commitment impact the scoreboard?” If you struggle to answer the question directly, the commitment you’re considering is likely focused on your whirlwind. Holding WIG sessions with no specific outcomes. The cadence of accountability will collapse without disciplined adherence to the WIG session agenda. Every WIG session needs to account specifically for prior commitments and result in clear commitments for the future. Repeating the same commitment more than two consecutive weeks. Even a high-impact commitment, if repeated week after week, becomes routine. You should always be looking for new and better ways to move the lead measures. Accepting unfulfilled commitments. The team must fulfill their commitments regardless of their day-to-day whirlwind. When a team member fails to keep a commitment, regardless of all the work you’ve done to install 4DX, you face the moment that matters most.

That’s why Susan’s job as the leader, particularly in the first few WIG sessions, is to set a new standard: Commitments are unconditional.

Susan: “Jeff, I also want you to know how important your contribution is to this team. Without you, we can’t reach our goal. This means that when we make a commitment, we have to find a way to fulfill it no matter what happens during the week.”

Susan gives Jeff the opportunity to report with real pride that all commitments have been fulfilled.

motivation.

Deep down, everyone wants to win. Everyone wants to contribute to goals that really matter. It’s so disheartening to push and push day in and day out and wonder if you’re making a difference.

But far beyond this, the ultimate outcome of Discipline 4 is a cadence of accountability that produces not only reliable results again and again, but also a high-performance team.

use.

1. Your team’s organizational structure and team members 2. Your WIG and “from X to Y by when “lag measure, as well as your week by week targets for performance 3. Your lead measures and their daily or weekly performance standard 4. Your team’s commitments from last week and status on follow through, as well as commitments for next week 5. At-a-glance summary tracking of WIGs, lead measures, WIG sessions and commitments

1. Enter personal performance on the lead measures. 2. Check off the commitments from last week that were fulfilled. 3. Enter commitments for next week. All three of these responsibilities should be taken care of before the session begins.

Over my years in this business, I’ve said many times that, in the absence of a crisis, transformative change is almost impossible. When you walk into a business that’s a few days away from bankruptcy, you automatically have everyone’s attention.

The second indicator I watch for is how prepared people are in the WIG sessions. And do you know how I gauge that? By how long they last. WIG sessions are designed to be short, concise meetings that move the teams forward. If they’re taking too long, something’s not working.

worldwide.

As most leaders know, achieving record results in sales, profit, and the satisfaction of your customers in the same year is quite an achievement.

Leaders who are struggling are ready to accept anything that will help them. Leaders who are succeeding need the time and opportunity to assess an idea on their own and test its worth.

Even leaders who are passionate and committed need the extra pressure of accountability to help them stay focused when their whirlwind is raging.

progress.

results are greatest when the game is played as a team, rather than focusing on the talents of a few individual superstars.

Instead of waiting to respond after bad things happened, we now proactively planned ways to keep them from happening.

RULES FOR DISCIPLINE 1 1 No more than 1 to 3 WIGs per person at the same time. 2 The battles have to win the war. 3 You can veto, but don’t dictate. 4 A WIG must have a finish line (from x to y by when)

“If every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, which one area would we want to improve the most?”

Selecting a high-level WIG for an entire organization always feels a little like buying a pair of shoes. You have to walk around in them for a while before deciding if they feel right. Don’t force the team to decide on the WIG too quickly. Instead, just select the WIG that seems right, and let the leaders walk around in it as they develop supporting WIGs to ensure its achievement. They can always select a different WIG if it doesn’t feel right to apply it across the organization.

THREE SOURCES OF ORGANIZATIONAL WIGS We’ve noticed that almost every leadership team, regardless of industry, size, or geography, chooses a highest-level WIG from one of three areas: financial, operational, or customer satisfaction. Financial WIGs are measured in dollars, whether top-line revenue, bottom-line profit, or some key measure in between. Surprisingly, less than a third of our clients choose a financial WIG as their first priority, even though financial results are always among the highest priorities. Operational WIGs focus on production, quality, efficiency, or economies of scale. Most leadership teams focus here initially. These WIGs often focus on key operational measures such as production volume, quality improvements, increased market share, or expansion into new areas. Customer satisfaction WIGs focus on closing the gap between the current level of performance and the level that represents excellence, whether to customers of a business, patients in a hospital, or guests in a hotel. Unlike financial and operational WIGs, these measures depend on the perception of the customer.

Your highest-level WIG is a point of laser focus; one to which you will give a disproportionate amount of energy because it requires a change in human behavior.

This brings us to the third component of your strategy: Initiatives that will require a change in people’s behavior to successfully implement. These are by far the most challenging in any strategy and the primary target of 4DX.

4DX.

Once the war is set, defining the battles becomes the leader’s key responsibility. The metaphor of wars and battles is helpful for several reasons: First, you should ideally fight only one war at a time; second, all lower-level WIGs (battles) must be aimed at winning the war rather than at any other objective—after all, the only reason to fight a battle is to win the war; and third, you isolate those WIGs that are most essential for success. Leaders must ask, “What is the fewest number of battles necessary to win the war?”

This is the real power of a leadership team determining the fewest possible battles; it enables them to see if their war is winnable.

quickly.

Remember, the greatest challenge is not in developing the plan: It’s in changing the behavior of the front-line teams that must execute it while managing the never-ceasing demands of the whirlwind.

“Discipline is hard—harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work

The 4 Disciplines must be implemented by the leader. Our greatest breakthrough came when we realized that the most successful method of implementing the 4 Disciplines was through the leaders closest to the front line.

launches.

We strongly recommend that two individuals share this role to compensate for scheduling conflicts or unanticipated turnover. Internal coaches benefit the organization in the following ways. • Responsiveness. By assigning and developing individuals in this role, the organization creates a significant knowledge resource and immediate front-line support to 4DX leaders. There’s no need to bring in resources from outside. • Independence. The more experienced and capable the internal coach, the less need for on-going guidance from outside. • Continuity. As new leaders are hired or promoted, the internal coach can play a crucial role in quickly orienting them to the 4DX process.

Although the internal coach is not a full-time role, selecting the right individuals for the role is crucial. A strong 4DX coach will have a solid knowledge of the business, good communication skills, and the ability to develop and sustain good working relationships. The effectiveness of a coach is largely through influence rather than formal authority.

the shift supervisor the right level. Consider also the amount of discretionary time the leader can put toward 4DX. Leaders who control their own schedules can generally lead a WIG team. It’s also essential that team members have enough time to make, schedule, and fulfill weekly commitments.

What are the most common challenges of running 4DX every week? How do you deal with them? Teams often face three challenges: performing consistently on lead measures, keeping the scoreboard current, and attending WIG sessions regularly. First, team members have to mentally decouple the WIGs from lead measures, meaning that they must focus on consistent and successful performance of the lead measures before they see the lag measure moving. It’s like going to the gym every day: You need to exercise patience before you see the changes that result from exercise. If team members are sporadic about their performance against lead measures, they won’t see the impact on the lag measures. Second, team members may feel that keeping a scoreboard current is unnecessary busy-work. Unless the scoreboard is updated, nobody knows the score—they can’t see if the lead measures are affecting the lags. Moreover, WIG sessions lose their power without the results of teamwork made visible. Third, WIG sessions get postponed or canceled and team interest starts draining away. Without regular WIG sessions, people lose focus and no longer feel accountable for their commitments. The WIG session must be sacred. Team members must contribute to the quality of the WIG meeting by making commitments that impact the lead measures and WIG success.

“You can’t talk your way out of a situation you have behaved yourself into!”

Require all managers to report on their adherence to the process. Ask them to report:  Team lag measure results for the week  Team lead measure results for the week  WIG meeting held and attendance percentage  Percentage of team commitments fulfilled  Personal commitment for last week and results  Personal commitment for next week

While individual contributors make commitments to drive the lead measures, the most effective commitments a leader can make will leverage and improve the capabilities of the team. So instead of making direct commitments to the lead measures, the leader makes commitments that enable the entire team to move the lead measures.

“Leaders do not get paid for what leaders do. Leaders get paid for what they can get others to do.”

How should we align compensation to support 4DX? There is no one answer to this question. If your organizational culture and compensation plan rewards performance against clearly articulated objectives at all levels, then compensation aligned to achieving WIGs would be both appropriate and expected. This plan will further reinforce the importance of 4DX as an operating system for achieving results. If your current compensation plan is not aligned to performance, compensation for achieving WIGs can still be a sound practice. Note, however, that the purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to reward the right people in the first place, and to keep them there—this is the lesson Jim Collins learned in his research for Good to Great. Pay for performance on WIGs works fine, as long as you have the right people on the team.

I’m having trouble determining whether we are making high-quality commitments each week. Can you tell me what defines a good commitment? A high-quality commitment has three characteristics: • Specific. Don’t settle for a commitment such as “I’m going to focus on upselling.” Instead, push for more specifics, such as “I’m going to coach three team members on how to properly upsell our premium wines.” • Aligned. Ensure that every commitment aligns to the WIG. Don’t accept a commitment from the whirlwind. Each week in the WIG session, each team member answers the following question: “What could I do personally this week that would have the greatest impact on achieving our WIG?” This question should generate a weekly stream of new and better answers to match the changing priorities of the team. • Timely. Make sure the commitment can be completed in the coming week. Watch out for multi-week commitments. Be wary of the “I’m making progress” answer.

What kinds of lead measures yield the best results for these kinds of teams? We have found very powerful lead measures tend to come from the touch points or the handoff within a technical or creative environment. For example: • Increased interaction and communication earlier in the development process • Sharing of knowledge with others • Midstream process checks • Key stakeholder discussions to assess changing requirements with development underway

• @sergeiw

According to Dr. Ray Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, 80 percent of our health-care budget is consumed by five behavioral issues: smoking, drinking, overeating, stress, and not enough exercise. The cause of most disease, he says, is very well known and by and large behavioral. Just changing these five behaviors would eliminate our health-care crisis.

“I’ve seen a great many people who are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done. They have an impressive record of achievement on trivial

In your career, you will never leave a greater legacy than this. Instilling this sense of winning in the people you work with will not only drive a new level of performance in your organization, but will also equip these people with the skills and confidence they need to become winners in every phase of their lives, as workers, as fathers and mothers, or as leaders in their communities. And that’s a legacy that can’t be measured.