Key Lessons from The Four Disciplines of Execution

As entrepreneurs, we must be masters of execution. Learn the four disciplines of execution and how to employ these disciplines for maximum success.

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Entrepreneurs and small business owners, do you have a great plan but you find yourself struggling with actually doing the work? Do you consider yourself an idea person, but you struggle with executing on those ideas? This week, I am sharing my key takeaways from the book, “The Four Disciplines of Execution.”

As an entrepreneur. We all have so many things to attend to. You may say to yourself any given day, “I'm not 100% clear on what I should be working on today. I have a bit of a plan. I consider myself organized yet I still feel scattered.” Does this resonate with you?

In my career, I've had to get very good at executing on the goals and plans that I set for myself or that I set for the organization. I've learned some things and yet I'm still learning! And that is why I enjoyed absorbing the key lessons from “The Four Disciplines of Execution” by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling. Even an old dog can learn new tricks! Be sure to read to the end because I'm going to give you a bonus tip to ensure your success in achieving your goals.

Discipline #1: Focus on Wildly Important Goals

The first discipline that the authors discuss is focusing on your wildly important goals. They make it a point of saying keep your list of goals small – therefore, focus on no more than two goals. The reason is you want to build credibility with yourself and build confidence in yourself by having success with those one or two goals. The authors state, “there will always be more good ideas than the capacity to execute on those ideas.”

The other reason that we want to be focused is that we have more chance of success. If you have one goal, you have an 80% chance of success. If you have two goals, 80 times 80 is a 64% chance of success. If you have three goals, your chance of success declines to 51%. In order to increase your chance of success, you need to remain focused.

Discipline #2: Focus on Lead Measures

The second discipline is to focus on lead measures rather than lag measures. Lag measures are your wildly important goals. Lag measures are like looking in the rear-view mirror. Of course, you want to measure those, but your daily activities will be focused on your lead measures.

We need to develop these lead measures that are predictive and influenceable. In other words, if you do “X”, “Y” is likely to happen. “X” is the daily activities that you control.

For example, if you have a sales goal of $50,000 this year, you will need to make so many calls per week and have so many leads coming into your system, recognizing that all those leads are not going to turn into sales in order to make that $50,000.

Your lag measure is the $50,000 sales goal. Your lead measures are how many calls you need to make per week to generate leads and the conversion rate you experience in converting leads into sales.

Another example would be in building an audience or an email list. Say you want to get to 1,000 email subscribers on your list by the end of your year and you have identified a strategy of being a guest on podcasts and working with collaborators to cross-market to each others’ audiences. Your lag measure will be the number of email subscribers on your list and your lead measure will be how many emails you will send to podcast hosts per week and how many collaboration invitations you will extend per week.

I love this concept because it gets to the heart of business-building and what quantifiable action we need to take today to see the results we want.

Discipline #3: Create Compelling Scorecards

You have likely heard the saying that “what gets measured, matters.” If we don’t keep a scorecard of our most important business metrics, we will not be as focused on making those efforts count. Since we just learned about lead measures, my recommendation is to separate your scorecard into two sections – lead measures and lag measures.

One quick note is that if you have a team, scorecards become even more important because people act differently when they’re being measured and scored.

Discipline #4: Have a Cadence of Accountability

To be excellent at executing on our strategies and achieving our wildly important goals, we need to have accountability. In addition to getting things done, we need to make sure that we are not excellent at accomplishing unimportant things, to the detriment or exclusion of our important tasks.

Especially when you are leading a team, you as a leader need to be accountable to your team and do what you say you are going to do. You also need to hold them accountable. One of the best ways to do so is to have a weekly meeting where everyone reports on their progress in working toward a goal and/or meeting their lead measures.

The authors caution us that, without accountability, the goal “naturally disintegrates into the whirlwind of our day-to-day work.” Our direction has to be so vivid and we have to hold ourselves and our team members accountable so that they're handling both the urgent work and the important work.

Bonus: Select an Accountability Partner or Business Coach

Being an entrepreneur, we may not have a team and it's sometimes really hard to be accountable to ourselves. One way that we can assure accountability is by hiring a business coach or to having an accountability partner. Whichever one you choose, I encourage you to be very selective because your coach or accountability partner needs to be able to be completely honest with you, to give you tough love when you're truly not focusing on the most important things, or to call “BS” when you have too many excuses and you're not focusing on the right things.

As we close today’s post, I want to remind you of our free, downloadable “Win the Week! Planner.” The “Win the Week! Planner” fits perfectly with today’s message because it allows you to make sure that you are fitting your strategic work (work on your wildly important goals) into the week around your client's needs and appointments.

Having a weekly planning process helps me balance both the operational and the strategic work, and in doing so, I can take these disciplines of execution and implement them.

Categories: Goals, Strategy, Focus, Motivation