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The conclusion of the book hits on the key of every successful organization. It is all about the culture. The real heart of the execution process is all about making the team member commit long-term to the goal. For this to happen, employees have to become accountable to each other. Reviewing the scoreboard to see if the team is meeting the lead and lag goals to support the WIG creates accountability. From there, it becomes easier to plan for the upcoming weeks and set commitments to impact those measurements.

The Fourth Discipline of Execution: Establishing a Culture of Accountability.

Commitment to the overall goal can make or break a team. Making the big goal small makes the commitment more realistic. Every team member should be responsible for setting and meeting weekly commitments that have an impact on lead measures. Executing strategic goals requires changing people’s behaviors in the midst of a whirlwind of urgent daily tasks. But to execute their vision across the organization, company leaders should focus on just one or two strategic goals and useful measures. It becomes important to have leaders choose their commitments themselves so they are engaged. As a team leader, your role is to make sure that the commitments are specific and directly connected to the WIG. Installing a culture of accountability requires you to set an example for your team.

The culture of accountability can be scary and painful if handled poorly. It is easy to become negative if the goals are met, especially if they relate to profitability. If they don’t meet a commitment, make sure you handle it respectfully. Let the staffer know you value their work but explain that it’s critical for the sake of the whole team that everyone follows through on their WIG commitments. Make sure to give them a chance to catch up on their commitment. In the same way, it is always important to celebrate every success!

After identifying the WIG of your organization and stating the lead and lag measurements it is important to match it with what you are currently doing. Having conversations with both leaders and staff you gather as many ideas as possible then start to narrow them down and rank their importance to impact. Having a simple and clear definition of your goal will be beneficial to all. With the leads and lag measurements, start with a verb and follow with the lead or lag measurement then conclude with a deliverable and a deadline. Example: Reduce (verb) production costs (lag measure) from 20 to 15 million (deliverable) by December 31st (deadline). Constantly re-evaluate and test your measures, making sure they are predictive, precise and measurable. After defining and identifying the goals it then becomes critical to help the team reach the goal.

The Third Discipline of Execution: Motivate Your Team by Keeping Score of Their Performance.

Everyone loves the feeling of winning. Keeping score will naturally improve performance and creates a higher level of engagement. Showing everyone how they’re performing makes it easy for employees to manage and understand where the team should be and where it is in reality. Every team member must be able to tell at a glance whether they’re winning or losing. Scoreboards should show lag and lead measures related to this specific goal, so your team knows how they’re actually performing.

“When winners are given data that shows that they are losing, they figure out a way to win.”

The action step for the third discipline is creating a scoreboard for the team to see. Have this board include the essential information: goal, lead, and lag measures. Have it up and then update it regularly to see if the current behavior is supporting the big goal. Almost all goals of any organization can be broken down into monthly targets to even weekly and daily targets. Making sure you stay on track in the little moments will create big differences for the quarter and year mark. Having a scoreboard shows the progress and makes employees see if they are on track or not.  

The 4 Disciplines of Execution has already had an impact on our team meetings and has made us refocus on our goals. We took the opportunities to review our goals and identify the lead and lag measures within our team. These measures have to be realistic and must be measures to help us win, not measures that make us depressed when we come up short.

The second discipline of execution: Meet your goals by choosing measures that reflect current behavior.

Lead measures are those that reflect on current behavior and can still influence them to help meet your goal. Lag measures are those that reflect the past performance and show the position relative to the goal. For a simple example, losing weight, lead measures would be counting calories and exercises which lead to the lag measurement of the scale at the end of the month.

Concentrating on lag measures is a natural response. That being said, it does little help in actually achieving the goal. Lead measures you can monitoring and actually have control during the process. Indicators reflect past events you can no longer change. It’s too late to do anything with the lag measures. Knowing and doing are two very different things. You must focus on the things you can control and the little leading measures. Current actions directly influence your goal.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution are strategies for all leaders and teams to make real changes for better results. 4DX is the process that organization use to keep up with craziness in the business world. Getting people to change is the real challenge of most leaders and the reason majority of goals are not achieved. From a business standpoint, change is good and necessary. You need to always be improving. Lasting changes require that people change their behavior. Through the month of July our team is reading through this book and diving into the four disciplines:

• Focusing on the Wildly Important Goals (WIG)

• Acting on Lead Measures

• Keeping a Compelling Scoreboard

• Creating a Cadence of Accountability

The first discipline is focusing on the wildly important goals (WIG). This is a very specific goal that is ranked higher than all other and it is so important that nothing else matters. It is natural to want to do more but the more you try to do, the less you’ll be able to focus on and put effort into individual tasks. If you want to achieve something truly excellent, you have to concentrate on it. Prioritize the one or two goals that will have an impact on your team’s performance and can come from within the whirlwind. Whirlwinds are daily tasks that take up your time and drain your creative energy. The purpose is to see improvement. WIG should not function like a vision or a mission statement. It’s about outlining a clear goal that the whole team will work towards. Each WIG must have a beginning and end goal by a specific time and date. Gain buy-in from the team and focus on the WIG.

What is your Wildly Important Goal?