4 Disciplines of Execution

“To achieve a goal you have never achieved before, you must start doing things you have never done before.”

W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. The problem is inherent in the system. As a leader, you own responsibility for the system. Although a particular person can be a big problem, if you find yourself blaming the people, you should look again.

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.

If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.

A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members.

“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,”

As Stephen R. Covey says, “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.”

“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?”

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.

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.

W. Edwards Deming, the management and quality guru, said it best when he told executives that managing a company by looking at financial data (lag measures) is the equivalent of “driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.”

As with most teams, their problem was not that they didn’t know, it was a matter of focus—they didn’t do. There were dozens of things that needed improvement and focus,

They spent every day spreading their energy across so many urgent priorities and trying to move all the dials at once that in the end, nothing moved.

“The mass of activity will always be pointless, poorly conceived, badly directed, wastefully executed, and largely beside the point. A small portion of activity will always be terrifically effective. . . . it is probably not what you think it is; it is opaque and buried within a basket of less effective activity.”

“So, how can I tell if they’re doing these things?” the manager asked. “You won’t. Your people will track themselves.”

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.

In our experience, nothing affects morale and engagement more powerfully than when a person feels he or she is winning. In many cases, winning is a more powerful driver of engagement than money, benefits packages, working conditions, whether you have a best friend at work, or even whether you like your boss, all of which are typical measures of engagement.

It is truly amazing what you can accomplish by the simple discipline of meeting around a goal on a weekly basis over an extended period of time.

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

famous University of Kentucky basketball Coach Adolph Rupp said, “Whenever you see a man on top of a mountain, you can be sure he didn’t fall there.”

“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?”)

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.”

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. Unlike lag measures, which tell you if you have achieved your goal, lead measures tell you if you are likely to achieve your goal.

Many leaders define execution simply as the ability to set a goal and achieve it. After years of teaching these principles, we can tell you that this definition is insufficient. But, as discussed above, what’s difficult—and rare—is the ability to achieve a critical goal while living in the midst of a raging whirlwind. And it is even more difficult when achieving the goal requires changing the behaviors of a lot of people.

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.

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?

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.

What gets measured does get done—but only for a while. Then questions arise: “Why are they always measuring us?” “Who really cares if we make those numbers, anyway?” “Are we still doing that?” A scoreboard can come to feel like a dreaded reminder of “something we should be doing but aren’t.”

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.