What are the root causes of weak execution?

• Breakdown of clarity of the objective.
  • Only 1 employee in 7 could name even one of their organization’s most important goals.
  • The other 85% named what they thought was the goal, but it often didn’t remotely resemble what their leaders had said.
• Lack of commitment / passion.
  • Only 51 percent could say that they were passionate about the team’s goal, leaving almost half the team simply going through the motions.
• Accountability.
  • 81 percent of the people surveyed said they were not held accountable for regular progress on the organization’s goals.
  • And the goals were not translated into specific actions—87 percent had no clear idea what they should be doing to achieve the goal.

The real enemy of execution is your day job!

• It’s the massive amount of energy that’s necessary just to keep your operation going on a day-to-day basis; this whirlwind is the thing that makes it so hard to execute anything new.
• Once you become aware of this struggle, you will see it playing out everywhere, in any team that is trying to execute anything new.

The 4 Disciplines are rules for executing your most critical strategy in the midst of your whirlwind:

1. Focus on the Wildly Important
   1. No team focuses on more than two WIGs at the same time.
      • Focus on less so your team can achieve more. Select one (at the most two) extremely important goals instead of trying to improve everything at once.
      • “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? Why?”
      • Overall (Org) WIG.
        • Consider: Mission → Vision → Strategy → Behavior Change → Org WIG.
        • A financial goal. Prospective revenues, profitability, investment performance, cash flow, and/or cost savings.
        • A quality goal. Efficiencies gained, cycle times, productivity improvements, and/or customer satisfaction.
        • A strategic goal. Service to the mission, competitive advantages gained, opportunities captured, and/or threats reduced.
      • Team WIG. When a subordinate manager is aligning to a larger WIG:
        • Gather as many ideas as possible. Rank by impact on organizational WIG.
        • “What are the greatest strengths of the team that can be leveraged to ensure the overall WIG is achieved?”
        • “What are the areas where the team’s poor performance most needs to be improved to ensure the overall WIG is achieved?”
   2. The battles you choose must win the war.
   3. Senior leaders can veto, but not decide.
   4. All WIGs must have a finish line in the form of from X to Y by when.
2. Act on the Lead Measures
   • Lag Measures (outputs) are tracking measures of the WIG.
   • Lead Measures (levers / inputs) are the measures of the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal. It is predictive and can be influenced by team members.
     • Small outcomes are lead measures that focus the team on achieving a weekly result, but give each member of the team latitude to choose their own method for achieving it.
     • Leveraged behaviors are lead measures that track the specific behaviors you want the team to perform throughout the week. They enable the entire team to adopt new behaviors at the same level of consistency and quality, and provide a clear measurement of how well they are performed. With a leveraged behavior lead measure, the team is accountable for performing the behavior, rather than for producing the result.
   • Different people have different innate time-frames (stratums) they plan on. Thus, it’s not unusual that a higher stratum manager’s lag measure (input) is a lower stratum / subordinate manager’s lead measure (output).
     • For example, CEO sees company able to achieve 5m PnL by EOY, can visualize in both time (broken down by quarter) and space (who does what).
     • Sr Trader sees 500k PnL for their book by EOQ.
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
   1. Simple.
   2. Visible.
   3. Complete.
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability
   1. Review the Scoreboard.
   2. Report on Last Week’s Commitments.
   3. Make Commitments for the Coming Week.