Season #2 - Episode #12 - The 4 Disciplines Of Execution By Stephen Covey

Hello, Self Developers and welcome to The Patrick Kelly Podcast for Self-Development, where I will be reviewing  audible books on Self-Development that can change your life for the better this year, and years to come. It is said that if we keep on doing what we always did, we will keep on getting what we always got. In other words, to change our output, we first have to change our input.

Today is March 20, 2022, and This is Episode 11 of Season 2, and today we will be reviewing the audible book “The 4 Disciplines Of Execution” By Stephen Covey. This audible book will teach you what the 4 disciplines of execution are, and why they work.  

Section #1: The 4 Disciplines of Execution – also known as 4DX:

Discipline 1: Focus On The Wildly Important: The first discipline is to focus your finest effort on the one or two goals that will make all the difference, instead of giving mediocre effort to dozens of goals. Execution starts with focus. Without it, the other three disciplines won’t be able to help you. The inability of leaders to focus is a problem of epidemic proportions. Focusing on the wildly important means narrowing the number of goals you are attempting to accomplish, beyond the day-to-day demands of your whirlwind. Discipline 1 is about applying more energy against fewer goals because, when it comes to setting goals, the law of diminishing returns, is as real as the law of gravity. If a team focuses on two or even three goals beyond the demands of their whirlwind, they can often accomplish them. However, if they set four to ten goals, our experience has been that they will achieve only one, or two. To the wildly important goal you want to devote your best effort.

Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures: The second discipline is to apply disproportionate energy to the activities, that drive your lead measures. This provides the leverage for achieving the lag measures. Discipline 2 is the discipline of leverage. Lead measures are the “measures” of the activities most connected to achieving the goal. Discipline 1 takes the wildly important goal for an organization, and breaks it down into a set of specific, measurable targets, until every team has a wildly important goal that it can own. Discipline 2 then defines the leveraged actions that will enable the team, to achieve that goal. While a lag measure tells you if you’ve achieved the goal, a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal. While a lag measure is hard to do anything about, a lead measure is virtually within your control. 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. In this way, your team is creating a just-in-time plan, that enables them

to quickly adapt, while remaining focused on the WIG.

Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: The third discipline is to make sure everyone knows the score at all times, so that they can tell whether or not, they are winning. This is the discipline of engagement. Remember, people play differently when they are keeping score. The difference in performance between a team that simply understands their lead and lag measures as a concept, and a team that actually knows their score, is remarkable. If the lead and lag measures are not captured on a visual scoreboard and updated regularly, they will disappear into the distraction of the whirlwind. Simply put, people disengage when they don’t know the score. When they can see it at a glance, whether or not they are winning, they become profoundly engaged. Great teams know at every moment whether or not they are winning. They must know, otherwise, they don’t know what they have to do, to win the game. A compelling scoreboard tells the team where they are, and where they should be information, essential to team problem solving and decision making. That’s why a great team can’t function without a scoreboard that compels action. Without it, energy dissipates, intensity lags, and the team goes back to business as usual.

Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability: The fourth discipline is to create a cadence of accountability, a frequently recurring cycle of accounting for past performance and planning to move the score forward. Discipline 4 is where execution actually happens. As we’ve said, Disciplines 1, 2, and 3 set up the game; but until you apply Discipline 4, your team isn’t in the game. This is the discipline that brings the team members all together, and that is why it encompasses, the other disciplines. Many leaders define execution simply as the ability to set a goal and achieve it. Great teams operate with a high level of accountability. Without it, team members go off in all directions, with each doing what he/she thinks is most important. Under this approach, the whirlwind soon takes over. Disciplines 1, 2, and 3 bring focus, clarity, and engagement, which are powerful and necessary elements for your success. But with Discipline 4, you and your team ensure that the goal is achieved, no matter what is happening around you. In a 4DX organization, accountability means making personal commitments to the entire team to move the scores forward and then following through, in a disciplined way.

Section #2: Installing 4 DX With Your Team:As you’ve learned in section 1, 4DX is an operating system for achieving the goals you must achieve.Keep in mind that 4DX is not a set of guidelines, but a set of disciplines.If you’re a senior executive who will lead the efforts of others in implementing 4DX, you’ll find it a valuable overview of the journey. If you’re a leader who will be implementing 4DX with your own team, you’ll find a detailed road map of that journey. You’ll appreciate its value once you begin.

Installing Discipline 1: Focus On The Wildly Important: Superb team performance begins with selecting one or two WIGs. Focusing on these vital few goals is the foundational principle of 4DX: Without it, your team will get lost in the whirlwind. Many teams have multiple goals—sometimes dozens, all of which are priority one. Of course, that means that nothing, is priority one. When you work on that many goals, you actually work on none of them, because the amount of energy you can put into each one is so small, it’s meaningless. Selecting the right WIG is crucial. Leaders often hesitate to narrow their focus, because they worry about the consequences of choosing the wrong WIG or failing to achieve it. Still, when you choose a WIG, you’re starting a game that matters; one where the stakes are high, and the team can make a real difference. Discipline 1 is necessary if you’re going to play to win.

Installing Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures: 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. You will use lead measures to track those activities that have the highest leverage on the WIG. Acting on lead measures is essential to superb performance, but it is also the single most difficult aspect of installing 4DX in your team. There are three reasons for this:

• Lead measures can be counterintuitive. Most leaders focus on lag measures, the bottom

line results that ultimately matter. This focus is only natural. But you cannot act on a lag measure because it’s in the past.

• Lead measures are hard to keep track of. They are measures of new and different behaviors, and tracking behaviors is much harder than tracking results. Often, there is no readily available system for tracking lead measures, so you might have to invent such a system.
• Lead measures often look too simple. They demand a precise focus on a certain behavior

that might look insignificant (although it isn’t), particularly to those outside the team.

Installing Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard: Discipline 3 is the discipline of engagement. Even though you’ve defined a clear and effective game in Disciplines 1 and 2, the team won’t play at their best unless they are emotionally engaged—and that happens when they can tell if they are winning or losing. The key to engagement is a big, visible, continually updated scoreboard that is compelling to the players. Recall three principles.

Principle 1: PEOPLE PLAY DIFFERENTLY WHEN THEY ARE KEEPING SCORE:

People give less than their best and finest effort, if no one is keeping score—it’s just human nature.

And note the emphasis: People play differently when they are keeping score. There’s a remarkable

difference between a game where the leader scores the team and a game where the players score

each other. It means that the team takes ownership of the results. It’s their game to play.

Principle 2: A COACH’S SCOREBOARD IS NOT A PLAYERS’ SCOREBOARD:

A coach’s scoreboard is complex and full of data. A players’ scoreboard is simple. It shows a

handful of measures that indicate to the players, if they are winning or losing the game. They serve

different purposes. As a leader you can guide, but you can’t build a players’ scoreboard without the

involvement of the players.

Principle 3: THE PURPOSE OF A PLAYERS’ SCOREBOARD IS TO MOTIVATE THE

PLAYERS TO WIN:

If the scoreboard doesn’t motivate energetic action, it is not compelling enough to the players. All

team members should be able to see it, and watch it change moment by moment, day by day, or

week by week. They should be discussing it all the time. They should never really take their minds

off it.

Installing Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability: Discipline 4 is the discipline of accountability. Even though you’ve designed a game that’s clear and effective, without consistent accountability, the team will never give their best efforts to the game. You might begin well, your team may have the best of intentions to execute, but before long, the whirlwind will pull you back into a consuming cycle of reacting to the urgent. Discipline 4 breaks this cycle by constantly reconnecting team members to the game. More crucially, it reconnects them in a personal way. Because they are frequently and regularly accountable to each other, they become invested in the results, and play to win.

Closing Thoughts: On scale of 1 to 5, I would give this audible book, a super duper 5, for providing the 4 disciplines of execution in order to win.

*To find out more about this audible book, Go To: www.audible.com and download this audible book, or go to www.stephencovey.com to find out more information about the Author.

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