The 4 Disciplines of Execution – one chapter in and I am hooked.
I found the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution after reading a recommendation on the Thoughtful app. A friend of a friend suggested this book as a means of transforming organizations through a focus on execution. Execution is often the bastard step-child of leadership. Strategy gets all the attention. Yet, without execution, strategies simply whither and die.
The book caught my eye because it met an intersection of my thoughts recently. Last semester, our College of Business shared it’s updated strategy and associated goals. Last week, I completed a multi-day course redesign focused on leadership. Currently, I’m writing a book on individual productivity and purpose, working on a chapter on habits. In all three instances, I recognized that having vision, missions, goals, and plans were not sufficient for success. Each requires execution. Yet, that’s one area where my mind isn’t clear. What actions are necessary for execution? My hope is this book would help fill that void.
Here’s what I’ve discovered so far.
The 4 Disciplines
Discipline 1: Focus on the wildly important goals.
There’s an insatiable temptation to do more as a leader. The grander the vision, the more splendid the accomplishments. To reach those grand visions, there’s a temptation to set more goals – to attack a problem from multiple different directions – to add complexity to achieve more.
Ironically, focusing on fewer goals works better. It allows each person in the organization to know the full extent of the goals, enabling greater buy-in and greater ability to focus on the goals that matter most. Wildly important goals (WIG) are goals that are not just important, but critical, essential, and fundamental to success. Through such goals, leaders can better express the means of achieving the strategy.
After reading this, I wondered how might my department express a WIG. What goals are essential to us as a department? What goals are wildly important? If we look at the goals of the university and college, there is one area that I consider the biggest WIG of them all: student success. True to the mantra of SMART goals, this WIG should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timebound. In my mind, the best measure of student success would be long-term career success in the MIS field. But that’s difficult to measure and not very actionable. However, placement rate after graduation might work better. As such, I might recommend to our department that our WIG for student success be a 100% placement rate of our students within 6 months after graduation. A lot of what we do in the classroom and service can lead toward that goal. The only downside to this WIG is that we don’t have complete control over the outcome. Students will do what students do, sometimes shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes dropping out of the workforce all together.
Discipline 2: Act on lead indicators
While goals capture the attention, good indicators keep an organization on track for success. In the second discipline of execution, the book suggests that indicators should be leading, not lagging. In other words, what indicators express a behavior that leads to the outcome, not the outcome itself.
Considering the WIG for student success above – 100% placement rate of our students within 6 months of graduation. Great, right? Not so fast, that’s a clear lagging indicator. They have already graduated so we have no control over that. Instead, we should focus on leading indicators – things we have control over in our classrooms.
What specific behaviors might be leading indicators? To be honest, I hope to find more clarity on this topic when I read the the rest of the book. But my initial thoughts would be on what we do in the classroom or through service. Based on this limited understanding, a lead indicator might be the percentage of students that experience a business engagement, whether through class projects, guest speakers, internships, etc. These experiences do several things, including building the student networks, providing real organization experiences, and building a culture of professionalism. These in turn lead to a greater chance of placement after graduation.
Discipline 3: Keep a compelling scoreboard
The next discipline strives to make the goals and indicators an integral part of the day-to-day operations. Making a scoreboard compelling, public, and easily accessible helps keep the goals fresh on the minds of everyone in the organization. Constant reminders on the progress toward the goals, as measured through the leading indicators, keeps the goal in focus. Individual sub-units and employees can then look at their contribution to the whole.
While our department doesn’t currently have a scoreboard that I’m aware of, it sounds like something easy enough to implement. While I think our college and university have scoreboards, they are not available for all the faculty to see – but should be.
Discipline 4: Create a cadence of accountability
Ah, accountability! Where the rubber hits the road. Where execution happens consistently and long-term – where it becomes a habit. While its great to have goals, indicators, and a public scoreboard, each and every employee should be held responsible for accomplishing those goals. To do that, regular weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meetings should cover how the organization, unit, or sub-unit is progressing toward the WIG. As the book states: “The team must feel not only this is a winnable game, but a high-stakes game.” Each employee should be asked what they can do in the next week to move the needle on those indicators.
True to accountability, their annual evaluations should reflect the effort they put into these WIGs. But the key to the discipline is creating the cadence, the regular review of work toward the WIG. I see the similarities between this discipline and Agile methodology because Agile excels at creating that cadence of accountability with daily stand-up meetings and weekly or bi-weekly fulfillment cycles. As the book suggests, these meetings don’t need to be long, just regular. A weekly 20-minute meeting can be effective at keeping WIGs front and center. They can help refocus efforts when emergencies throw things off track, without overwhelming the employees attempting to do their work.
Here again, our department currently doesn’t have such a cadence. We do have occasional meetings on curriculum issues and personnel issues. As a whole department, though, we meet perhaps once or twice a semester. But given the competing demands of students, research, service, and other distractions, its easy to lose track of the WIGs.
Moving forward
Reading just the first chapter of this book has captured my attention, enough that I’m willing to recommend it. It fills a missing piece in my understanding of effective organizations. These four disciplines of execution provide a potentially huge improvement on operational excellence, turning strategies into action and transforming visions into reality. I look forward to reading the rest of the book and hope to add more posts on it soon.