The Four Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

Although some of you might roll your eyes at such a bold claim, the authors do have plenty of case studies to back it up. The book is peppered with quotes and stories from some of the world's biggest organizations. These organizations have successfully used the four disciplines not just once but time and time again.

Author Chris McChesney is one of the primary developers of the Four Disciplines of Execution. He's currently the Global Practice Leader of Execution at FranklinCovey.

Sean Covey is the Executive Vice President of Global Solutions and Partnerships at FranklinCovey. He led the original teams that conceived and created the Four Disciplines.

Jim Huling is the Managing Consultant for FranklinCovey's Four Disciplines of Execution. Before joining FranklinCovey, he was one of the first leaders to adopt the Four Disciplines with his own teams.

If you've ever been part of an initiative or goal that failed, or if you're leading a team and want to make sure your next project succeeds, then this is the book for you. The book is most applicable for leaders who have the power to influence how their goals are implemented. But, "The Four Disciplines of Execution" is also useful for anyone who wants to see their goals succeed, since some of the principles here can be applied outside a business setting.

Coming up, you'll learn the biggest challenge you're up against when trying to execute a strategy, why focusing on metrics might be a bad idea during execution, and how to develop useful lead measures for your team.

"The Four Disciplines of Execution" is divided into three sections, and comes in at around three hundred pages. Section one covers the four disciplines in detail. Section two looks at how to install the four disciplines in your team. Here, the authors devote a chapter to each discipline and explain how to get your team to adopt each of these mindsets. The last section looks at how to install the four disciplines throughout your entire organization.

The book starts out with some compelling stories about just what can be achieved when leaders adopt the four disciplines approach to implementing a strategy or goal.

One story is from a government leader in the United States. Others are from some of the world's biggest companies. The stories, and the goals of these leaders, are all really different. But they have one important thing in common: in each situation large numbers of people had to change their attitudes and behavior. These leaders were successful because they used the four discipline approach to do this. This is a nice way to start the book because it paints a clear picture of what's possible.

The authors next go into the common problems most people face when executing a strategy. And, you'll probably be nodding your head in recognition here. Getting people to change their behavior is never easy, and the authors cover many of the common mistakes and challenges most leaders run up against when trying to achieve a goal. Lack of commitment, lack of trust, and a lack of accountability are just some of the issues covered here.

While these are all major challenges, the biggest problem every leader faces in executing a strategy is the whirlwind of their day job. That is, the everyday demands you have to focus on to get your job done.

Although your daily job is important, it eats up the energy and focus you could be using to move your team forward. What's urgent usually trumps what's important. And, over time, the whirlwind can cause the slow death of your initiative, simply because you don't have the time or energy to make it happen.

By now you're probably ready to find out what these magical four disciplines are so you can learn how to start avoiding all these problems.

The four disciplines are "Focusing on the Wildly Important," "Acting on Lead Measures," "Keeping a Compelling Scoreboard," and "Creating a Cadence of Accountability." The four disciplines are designed to help you execute a strategy in the midst of the whirlwind of your daily responsibilities and commitments.

The authors spend the next four chapters covering each of these disciplines in great detail. But we'll go over them briefly here, so you have a better understanding of how each of them is relevant to executing a strategy.

The first discipline is Focusing on the Wildly Important. The authors start by stating a fact most of us know all too well: the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. Focusing on the Wildly Important means that as a leader, you have to focus on less, so your team can accomplish more. And, as you might have guessed, the things you focus on need to be wildly important. Pick one or, at most, two incredibly important goals, and make those the heart and soul of your team.

If you're wondering what this looks like in reality, think about Lance Armstrong, one of the world's most accomplished cyclists. Armstrong's Wildly Important Goal was to win the Tour de France again and again. So, he dedicated his career to this goal.

Even when he was competing in other races, that effort was in service to his Wildly Important Goal. He trained constantly for this goal and meticulously learned every stage of the race. As a result, he won the Tour de France more times than anyone else in history. Armstrong worked largely alone, but this is still a nice lesson on what you can achieve by focusing your efforts in a team, as well as on an individual basis.

Discipline two is Act on the Lead Measures. This discipline has to do with energy, and how well you're able to apply it to take action and get things done. Here, you need to identify the most important actions that will have an impact on your goal. You need to act on those, and leave the rest behind.

The authors make an insightful point here. Lead measures are not the tracking measurements like profit, revenue, or customer satisfaction. Those metrics, which the authors call "lag measures," are what most leaders focus on when they're trying to implement change. But, this is a mistake.

The authors say most of the time, when a key metric is out of sorts, the performance that drove it down is already history. This means it's often difficult, or even too late, to fix it. Instead, you need to focus on lead measures. These are the behaviors that will drive success on your lag measures – things that will improve efficiency or speed up the sales process, for example.

Now, we should point out that lag measures are important, and the authors aren't saying they're not. They simply stress that leaders shouldn't make those lag measures their primary focus.

The third discipline is Keep a Compelling Scorecard. And this discipline is all about engagement. Your team will be most engaged in your initiative if you have a scorecard designed by them. Put simply, you let them decide if they're winning or losing.

The last discipline is Create a Cadence of Accountability. And, here's where the execution part really comes into play. Here, you and your team hold each other accountable for the results of your Wildly Important Goal.

There are two secrets to making this work. The first is that you and your team have to hold each other accountable regularly, without fail. This means you need at least a weekly meeting that lasts no more than thirty minutes.

The second part of this secret is that each team member must be allowed to come up with his or her own commitments. They must decide how they're going to move the lead and lag measures towards the Wildly Important Goal. And, they have to report on these commitments to the rest of the group at every meeting. By being accountable to their team instead of just their boss, everyone is more excited and committed to the initiative.

An interesting element to these commitments is that they should change every week. During each meeting, team members should come up with new commitments based on what's most needed right now.

Keeping your team flexible enables all of you to respond to needs and threats as they arise. It also helps keep everyone engaged and motivated.

We really liked the concept of holding weekly accountability meetings. This is an idea that could be useful for any goal or change effort, no matter how large or small. If you're in a leadership role, it might be worth spending a bit more time learning the ins and outs of discipline four.

In the first half of the book, the authors devote a lot of time to covering each of these four disciplines in great detail. There's a lot of information here, far more than we could cover. By the time you're done, you'll have a thorough understanding of the four disciplines, and why they're not as easy to implement as you might think.

The second half of the book is where the real how-to's begin. The authors provide clear, step-by-step instructions for implementing the four discipline approach within your team, and organization.

The authors did a good job with this, devoting a chapter to each discipline again. So, you get an entire chapter on installing discipline one with your team. The next chapter focuses on how to implement discipline two, and so on.

All of these chapters are highly practical and focused, and quite detailed. We'll look at one of these now, installing discipline two, which is Act on the Lead Measures.

Remember, most leaders focus on what the authors call lag measures. Those are the metrics like revenue or customer satisfaction. The authors state that these metrics are ineffective during execution because they should be used at the end of the process, to let you and your team know that you've succeeded. Lead measures, on the other hand, are measures that let you know if you're likely to succeed.

Lead measures need to be predictive of achieving the Wildly Important Goal, and influenceable by your team. Lead measures are behaviors.

Here's an example. Imagine your team's Wildly Important Goal is to increase sales in your restaurant. Your lag measure would be an increase in the average check amount in your restaurant by ten percent by year's end. Your lead measure would be to suggest the specialty cocktail of the day to ninety-percent of all tables.

Put simply, the lead measure has to be something your team can act on to move the lag measure forward. Lead measures can be small actions teams take every week, or larger, leveraged measures that take place over months or years. The ones you choose should depend entirely on what's best for your team.

Sounds simple enough, but the authors state that this is actually the most difficult part of installing the four discipline approach in a team.

So how do you do it successfully? Like the rest of the how-to chapters, the authors provide clear step-by-step instructions that paint a clear picture of what you need to do.

Your first step is to brainstorm possible lead measures for your Wildly Important Goal. Ask this question to your team: What could we do that we've never done before that might make all the difference to our Wildly Important Goal?

Remember to stick with ideas that will impact your Wildly Important Goal.

Your next step is to rank your possible lead measures by impact. This step is important because you can't do them all. If you try to, you'll end up accomplishing nothing. Choose one or two that will have the most impact.

You next need to test your top ideas. The authors give several questions to help you analyze each idea and to make sure it really works.

Your last step is to define the lead measures. Here, you further refine your ideas and finalize the details. For instance, how often will you track the lead measure? Are you tracking team or individual member performance? How well is everyone on your team supposed to perform?

These are just some of the questions that force you to better define your lead measures so that they're clear and actionable by the rest of your team.

The remaining chapters continue in the same vein. The authors force you to consider each step of these disciplines in detail, and they leave no stone unturned with their instructions.

Every chapter is highly useful, and we feel that if you apply these four disciplines with your team, you'll probably succeed more than not using them at all. And, judging from some of the real-life examples in the book, the results might be better than you ever expected.

All in all, this is a useful, practical book that can transform the way you execute strategies and goals with your team. We have no trouble recommending it.

"The Four Disciplines of Execution," by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, is published by Free Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.