Chris McChesney, Bestselling Author and Executive at Franklin Covey, gave one of my favorite presentations at the Summit this year. The ability to lead teams and organizations to execute sets great leaders apart from good leaders.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution
- What do leaders struggle with more: strategy or execution?
- What are leaders educated in more: strategy or execution?
- The most difficult thing a leader will ever do is to drive a strategy that requires a change in human behavior.
- We tend to blame the people on our team instead of look at ourselves.
- Any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time the problem is not the people it’s the system, culture, and leader.
- We don’t get to blame the people.
#1 Focus: on the wildly important
- With too many goals people might love you but they can’t hear you
- “There will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute”
- What makes a wildly important goal is the treatment in which you give it.
- What are the fewest battles necessary to win the war? When you’re tackling something big, don’t go big go narrow.
- Maintain normal operations and blow the door off of one thing. 1 Goal per team at the same time.
- People have to have their say but they don’t have to have their way.
- Deadlines move from concepts to targets.
- Execution doesn’t like complexity.
- Simplicity and transparency are the two best friends of execution.
#2 Leverage: Act on the lead Measure
- Lag measures what happened
- Lead measures predict the future and are influencable by the team
- There is a rare difference between knowing a thing and knowing the data behind a thing.
- Bad news: data is hard to get
- Good news: people will be engaged
- Bad news: they’re going to forget about it in 3 days
#3 Engagement: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
- People play differently when they are keeping score
- We’re looking for a players scoreboard not a coaches scoreboard
- The number 1 driver of morale and engagement is whether people feel like they are winning or not
- Do the people who work for me feel like they are playing a winnable game?
#4 Accountability: Create a Cadence of Accountability
- Execution is so frustrating because in the moment the urgent always trumps what’s important
- Report on last week’s commitment
- Review and update scoreboard
- Make a a commitment for next week
- Secret: let people come up with their own commitments for the next week
- Great execution is about creating a pull, not pushing action.
- Create a winnable game and let the players go win the game
- Do the people who work for me feel like they are playing a winnable high stakes game?
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