(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child. To learn more about OCC click here...)
The 4 Disciplines of Execution
1.
Focus on the wildly important
2.
Act on the lead measures
3.
Keep a compelling scoreboard
4.
Create a Cadence of Accountability
Fifteen years ago a Harvard business professor asked us two
questions: What do leaders
struggle with more—strategy execution?
Are they educated in business planning or execution?
We believe the hardest thing a leader will ever do is
execute a strategy that involves changing human behavior. People resist change even when it’s
good for them.
One of the chief developers for Lockheed-Martin said the
hardest thing was doing anything that involved a change in the behavior of the
engineers.
We don’t admit our own failures and mistakes and tend to
blame the people around us.
Edwards Demming (father of the quality movement) said
“Anytime the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the
time the problem is not with the people.”
Execution is harder than strategy
Execution that involves changing behavior is the hardest
We can’t blame the people
There are four disciplines of execution
Focus/ Leverage/ Engagement/
Discipline 1: Focus
on the wildly important
--goals in addition to the whirlwind (load up on 2-3 and
you’ll get 2 done; load up on 4-10 you’ll get 1-2 done; load up on 11-20 you
get even less done)
Those
11-20 goals are based on good ideas but you’ll have to say no to some good
ideas
There
will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute.
Separate
in your mind the energy needed to maintain the operation from what you need to
execute on
What
lives at the corner of Really Important and Not Going to Happen On Its Own?
WIG
= Wildly Important Goal --
what makes it wildly important is the treatment you are going to give it -- Example of goal of increasing
membership from 750 to 1000
Identify
Key Battles--What are the fewest number of battles necessary to win the war?
Example
of NASA space race to the moon—battles: navigation; propulsion; life
support -- Don’t go big, go narrow
--
Rules for Discipline 1
1.
Fewest battles necessary to win the war
2.
One WIG per team at the same time
3.
You can veto, but don’t dictate (people have to have their say but they
don’t have to have their way)
4.
A WIG must have a Gap (from X to Y by When)
starting line-finish line-deadline
(when deadline for space race to the moon was given, morale and
engagement at NASA was at an all-time high)
Execution doesn’t like complexity.
Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures
Lead
measures are predictive and are influenceable by the team
Example
of weight loss: Need to know
number of calories in and number of calories expended (difference between
knowing the thing and knowing the data behind it)
Bad
news—data is hard to get
Good
news—it’s like solving a puzzle
Bad
news—they’ll forget everything in 3 days
Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
“People
play differently when THEY are keeping score.”
You
need a players’ scoreboard not a coach’s scoreboard
--simple
--highly
visible to players
--have
the right ‘lead’ and ‘lag’ measures
Number one indicator of engagement is whether a person
thinks they are winning.
Do the people who work for me feel like they are playing a
winnable game
Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability
WIG Session meeting each week--
--Weekly Commitment: In a meeting every person answers “What
are the things I can do that will have the biggest impact on the lead
measure?” Put that into your
schedule.
--Report on last week’s commitment
--Review and update scoreboard
--Make commitments for next week
This is stuff that you can’t put in a strategic plan. In a moment, urgency always
trumps importance.
It’s not about dictating; it’s about creating a winnable
game.
The rules, the natural laws for execution, turned out to be
the same as the laws for engagement.
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