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.